Trial reportPLoS biology2017
Beyond negative valence: 2-week administration of a serotonergic antidepressant enhances both reward and effort learning signals.
Trial report in PLoS biology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 57 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of 28-day simvastatin administration on emotional processing, reward learning, working memory, and salivary cortisol in healthy participants at-risk for depression: OxSTEP, an online experimental medicine trial.Psychological medicine · 2025Trial
- Computational modelling and neural correlates of reinforcement learning following three-week escitalopram: a double-blind, placebo-controlled semi-randomised study.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Multispecies probiotic administration reduces emotional salience and improves mood in subjects with moderate depression: a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study.Psychological medicine · 2023Trial
- Chronic escitalopram in healthy volunteers has specific effects on reinforcement sensitivity: a double-blind, placebo-controlled semi-randomised study.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2023Trial
- Lithium modulates striatal reward anticipation and prediction error coding in healthy volunteers.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Trial
- Modulation of anterior cingulate cortex reward and penalty signalling in medication-naive young-adult subjects with depressive symptoms following acute dose lurasidone.Psychological medicine · 2019Trial
- Neurochemical drivers of effort: The roles of dopamine and beyond in physical and cognitive exertion.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Integrating arousal and valence approaches to advance cognitive effort research.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- Antidepressant drugs have pharmacological- and time-dependent effects on reinforcement learning in healthy volunteers: An 8 weeks randomized double-blind placebo-controlled study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Active disambiguation guides inferring controllability and cause in social interactions.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A distributed subcortical circuit linked to instrumental information-seeking about threat.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Direct serotonin release in humans shapes aversive learning and inhibition.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Optogenetic activation of dorsal raphe serotonin neurons induces brain-wide activation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The involvement of serotonin in major depression: nescience in disguise?Molecular psychiatry · 2024Article
- Dorsal raphe neurons signal integrated value during multi-attribute decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Boosting Serotonin Increases Information Gathering by Reducing Subjective Cognitive Costs.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Article
- Role of serotonin in modulation of decision-making in Parkinson's disease.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2023Article
- Fluoxetine degrades luminance perceptual thresholds while enhancing motivation and reward sensitivity.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Article
- Associations Between Statin Use and Negative Affective Bias During COVID-19: An Observational, Longitudinal UK Study Investigating Depression Vulnerability.Biological psychiatry · 2022Observational
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
To make good decisions, humans need to learn about and integrate different sources of appetitive and aversive information. While serotonin has been linked to value-based decision-making, its role in learning is less clear, with acute manipulations often producing inconsistent results. Here, we show that when the effects of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI, citalopram) are studied over longer timescales, learning is robustly improved. We measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in volunteers as they performed a concurrent appetitive (money) and aversive (effort) learning task. We found that 2 weeks of citalopram enhanced reward and effort learning signals in a widespread network of brain regions, including ventromedial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex. At a behavioral level, this was accompanied by more robust reward learning. This suggests that serotonin can modulate the ability to learn via a mechanism that is independent of stimulus valence. Such effects may partly underlie SSRIs' impact in treating psychological illnesses. Our results highlight both a specific function in learning for serotonin and the importance of studying its role across longer timescales.
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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.