Trial reportCurrent biology : CB2015
Dissociable Effects of Serotonin and Dopamine on the Valuation of Harm in Moral Decision Making.
Trial report in Current biology : CB, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers.
What it found
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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
56 citing papers in PubMed, 126 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Oxytocin, but not vasopressin, decreases willingness to harm others by promoting moral emotions of guilt and shame.Molecular psychiatry · 2024Trial
- L-DOPA and oxytocin influence the neural correlates of performance monitoring for self and others.Psychopharmacology · 2024Trial
- Mindfulness training reduces slippery slope effects in moral decision-making and moral judgment.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Dopamine manipulations modulate paranoid social inferences in healthy people.Translational psychiatry · 2020Trial
- Enhancement in dopamine reduces generous behaviour in women.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Psilocybin and MDMA reduce costly punishment in the Ultimatum Game.Scientific reports · 2018Trial
- Effect of Psilocybin on Empathy and Moral Decision-Making.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2017Trial
- Human Enhancement: A Conceptual Scoping Review.The Journal of medicine and philosophy · 2026Article
- Beyond attention: methylphenidate reduces dishonesty in healthy adults.Psychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Generating a Mediation Model of Moral Cost and Aggression.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Dopamine Boosts Motivation for Prosocial Effort in Parkinson's Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Subcortical neural basis of malevolent creativity.iScience · 2025Article
- Avoiding Pain to Others Motivates Effortful Prosocial Behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Hypocritical blame is associated with reduced prosocial motivation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Moral emotions and auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia (Heidelberg, Germany) · 2025Review
- Heightened SAM- and HPA-axis activity during acute stress impairs decision-making: A systematic review on underlying neuropharmacological mechanisms.Neurobiology of stress · 2024Article
- Dopamine and serotonin in human substantia nigra track social context and value signals during economic exchange.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Negative emotionality downregulation affects moral choice but not moral judgement of harm: a pharmacological study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
An aversion to harming others is a core component of human morality and is disturbed in antisocial behavior. Deficient harm aversion may underlie instrumental and reactive aggression, which both feature in psychopathy. Past work has highlighted monoaminergic influences on aggression, but a mechanistic account of how monoamines regulate antisocial motives remains elusive. We previously observed that most people show a greater aversion to inflicting pain on others than themselves. Here, we investigated whether this hyperaltruistic disposition is susceptible to monoaminergic control. We observed dissociable effects of the serotonin reuptake inhibitor citalopram and the dopamine precursor levodopa on decisions to inflict pain on oneself and others for financial gain. Computational models of choice behavior showed that citalopram increased harm aversion for both self and others, while levodopa reduced hyperaltruism. The effects of citalopram were stronger than those of levodopa. Crucially, neither drug influenced the physical perception of pain or other components of choice such as motor impulsivity or loss aversion, suggesting a direct and specific influence of serotonin and dopamine on the valuation of harm. We also found evidence for dose dependency of these effects. Finally, the drugs had dissociable effects on response times, with citalopram enhancing behavioral inhibition and levodopa reducing slowing related to being responsible for another's fate. These distinct roles of serotonin and dopamine in modulating moral behavior have implications for potential treatments of social dysfunction that is a common feature as well as a risk factor for many psychiatric disorders.
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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.