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Abstract
The personality trait neuroticism is associated with increased vulnerability to anxiety and mood disorders, conditions linked with abnormal serotonin neurotransmission and emotional processing. The interaction between neuroticism and serotonin during emotional processing is however not understood. Here we investigate how individual neuroticism scores influence the neural response to negative emotional faces and their sensitivity to serotonergic tone. Twenty healthy participants performed an emotional face task under functional MRI on three occasions: increased serotonin tone following infusion of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), decreased serotonin tone following acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) protocol, and no serotonin challenge (control). During the task, participants performed a gender-discrimination task of neutral, fearful or angry facial expressions. Individual variations in neuroticism scores were associated with neural response of subgenual anterior cingulate cortex to fearful facial expressions. The association was however opposite under the two serotoninergic challenges. The fear-related response in this region and individual neuroticism scores correlated negatively during citalopram challenge and positively during ATD. Thus, neuroticism scores were associated with the relative impact of serotonin challenges on fear processing in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. This finding may link to a neural mechanism for the variable therapeutic effect of SSRI treatment observed in clinical populations.
Highlights
Impaired emotion-related processing has been associated with an increased risk for affective psychiatric illnesses, and facial expressions are linked to emotions and especially involved in social interactions[1,2]
Our main finding is that personality trait neuroticism alters the effect of serotonin challenges on the neural response to fearful faces
This is driven by a negative correlation between neuroticism and activity levels in subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) for fearful faces for the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) challenge, but a positive correlation for Acute Tryptophan Depletion (ATD)
Summary
Impaired emotion-related processing has been associated with an increased risk for affective psychiatric illnesses, and facial expressions are linked to emotions and especially involved in social interactions[1,2]. Functional brain imaging has shown that serotonergic challenges alter the neural processing of facial expressions[4,5,6], and may differentially modulate the neural response to different emotions such as anger and fear[5,7,8]. Whereas both fearful and angry faces imply threat, the type of threat is different for the two types of emotion. Neuroticism has been found to correlate positively with amygdala and sgACC activation during trials of high emotional conflict, compared with low emotional conflict trials[23] and a higher sgACC activation has been found in response to fearful faces[24]
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