ArticlePsychopharmacology2018
Psilocybin with psychological support improves emotional face recognition in treatment-resistant depression.
Article in Psychopharmacology, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 42 papers, 6 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The trial behind it
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed, 6 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 99 citations in OpenAlex.
- Impact of psilocybin on cognitive function: A systematic review.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2024Pooled it
- Therapeutic uses of psychedelics for eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2023Pooled it
- A Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)-Guided Dashboard to Review Psilocybin Target Domains: A Systematic Review.CNS drugs · 2022Pooled it
- Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy-A Systematic Review of Associated Psychological Interventions.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Pooled it
- Classic serotonergic psychedelics for mood and depressive symptoms: a meta-analysis of mood disorder patients and healthy participants.Psychopharmacology · 2021Pooled it
- Post-acute psychological effects of classical serotonergic psychedelics: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychological medicine · 2020Pooled it
- Negative affective bias in depression following treatment with psilocybin or escitalopram - a secondary analysis from a randomized trial.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Investigating the impact of serotonergic psychedelic drugs, MDMA and ketamine on social cognition in psychiatric disorders: A scoping review.Psychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Investigating Emotional Reactivity in Experienced Users of Psychedelics: A Cross-Sectional fMRI Study.Human brain mapping · 2026Article
- Design, Synthesis, and Pharmacokinetic Profiling of Fluorinated ReversibleJournal of medicinal chemistry · 2026Article
- Impact of preoperative antidepressant use on surgical and functional outcomes of robot assisted radical prostatectomy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Single-dose psychedelic enhances cognitive flexibility and reversal learning in mice weeks after administration.Psychedelics · 2025Article
- The Emergence of Psilocybin in Psychiatry and Neuroscience.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Psychedelic enhancement of flexible learning weeks after a single dose.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- 5-HT 2A and 5-HT 2C receptor antagonism differentially modulate reinforcement learning and cognitive flexibility: behavioural and computational evidence.Psychopharmacology · 2024Article
- Altered States and Social Bonds: Effects of MDMA and Serotonergic Psychedelics on Social Behavior as a Mechanism Underlying Substance-Assisted Therapy.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2024Review
- The effect of psilocybin on empathy and prosocial behavior: a proposed mechanism for enduring antidepressant effects.Npj mental health research · 2024Review
- Psilocybin for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Review
- Pattern breaking: a complex systems approach to psychedelic medicine.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Article
- Psychedelics, epilepsy, and seizures: a review.Frontiers in pharmacology · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 4 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
rationaleDepressed patients robustly exhibit affective biases in emotional processing which are altered by SSRIs and predict clinical outcome.
objectivesThe objective of this study is to investigate whether psilocybin, recently shown to rapidly improve mood in treatment-resistant depression (TRD), alters patients' emotional processing biases.
methodsSeventeen patients with treatment-resistant depression completed a dynamic emotional face recognition task at baseline and 1 month later after two doses of psilocybin with psychological support. Sixteen controls completed the emotional recognition task over the same time frame but did not receive psilocybin.
resultsWe found evidence for a group × time interaction on speed of emotion recognition (p = .035). At baseline, patients were slower at recognising facial emotions compared with controls (p < .001). After psilocybin, this difference was remediated (p = .208). Emotion recognition was faster at follow-up compared with baseline in patients (p = .004, d = .876) but not controls (p = .263, d = .302). In patients, this change was significantly correlated with a reduction in anhedonia over the same time period (r = .640, p = .010).
conclusionsPsilocybin with psychological support appears to improve processing of emotional faces in treatment-resistant depression, and this correlates with reduced anhedonia. Placebo-controlled studies are warranted to follow up these preliminary findings.
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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.