ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2009
Reconciling the role of serotonin in behavioral inhibition and aversion: acute tryptophan depletion abolishes punishment-induced inhibition in humans.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 145 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
145 citing papers in PubMed, 275 citations in OpenAlex.
- Behavioral intervention with task repetition compared to pharmacological intervention with SSRI for enhancement of cognitive control in emotional and non-emotional settings.Psychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Trial
- Facial expressions of pain: the role of the serotonergic system.Psychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- The effects of acute tryptophan depletion on instrumental reward learning in anorexia nervosa - an fMRI study.Psychological medicine · 2023Trial
- Trial
- Serotonin depletion impairs both Pavlovian and instrumental reversal learning in healthy humans.Molecular psychiatry · 2021Trial
- A single dose of escitalopram blunts the neural response in the thalamus and caudate during monetary loss.Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN · 2021Trial
- Reward and avoidance learning in the context of aversive environments and possible implications for depressive symptoms.Psychopharmacology · 2019Trial
- Probability differently modulating the effects of reward and punishment on visuomotor adaptation.Experimental brain research · 2017Trial
- Serotonin enhances the impact of health information on food choice.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Cortico-limbic connectivity in MAOA-L carriers is vulnerable to acute tryptophan depletion.Human brain mapping · 2017Trial
- Beyond negative valence: 2-week administration of a serotonergic antidepressant enhances both reward and effort learning signals.PLoS biology · 2017Trial
- Valence-dependent influence of serotonin depletion on model-based choice strategy.Molecular psychiatry · 2016Trial
- Serotonin reuptake inhibitors and serotonin transporter genotype modulate performance monitoring functions but not their electrophysiological correlates.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Serotonin and dopamine differentially affect appetitive and aversive general Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer.Psychopharmacology · 2015Trial
- Trial
- Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2014Trial
- Preliminary evidence that sub-chronic citalopram triggers the re-evaluation of value in intimate partnerships.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2014Trial
- The relationship between reward and punishment processing and the 5-HT1A receptor as shown by PET.Psychopharmacology · 2014Trial
- Serotoninergic effects on judgments and social learning of trustworthiness.Psychopharmacology · 2014Trial
85 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
The neuromodulator serotonin has been implicated in a large number of affective and executive functions, but its precise contribution to motivation remains unclear. One influential hypothesis has implicated serotonin in aversive processing; another has proposed a more general role for serotonin in behavioral inhibition. Because behavioral inhibition is a prepotent reaction to aversive outcomes, it has been a challenge to reconcile these two accounts. Here, we show that serotonin is critical for punishment-induced inhibition but not overall motor response inhibition or reporting aversive outcomes. We used acute tryptophan depletion to temporarily lower brain serotonin in healthy human volunteers as they completed a novel task designed to obtain separate measures of motor response inhibition, punishment-induced inhibition, and sensitivity to aversive outcomes. After a placebo treatment, participants were slower to respond under punishment conditions compared with reward conditions. Tryptophan depletion abolished this punishment-induced inhibition without affecting overall motor response inhibition or the ability to adjust response bias in line with punishment contingencies. The magnitude of reduction in punishment-induced inhibition depended on the degree to which tryptophan depletion reduced plasma tryptophan levels. These findings extend and clarify previous research on the role of serotonin in aversive processing and behavioral inhibition and fit with current theorizing on the involvement of serotonin in predicting aversive outcomes.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.