Efeitos do escitalopram sobre a identificação de expressões faciais / Effects of escitalopram on the processing of emotional faces.

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

ALVES NETO, W.C. Effects of escitalopram on the processing of emotional faces. Ribeirão Preto, SP: Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto, University of São Paulo; 2008. The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) have been used successfully for the treatment of various psychiatry disorders. The SSRI clinical efficacy is attributed to an enhancement of the serotonergic neurotransmission, but little is known about the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying this process. Several evidences suggest that serotonin is involved with the regulation of social behavior, learning and memory process and emotional processing. The recognition of basic emotions on facial expressions represents an useful task to study the emotional processing, since they are a condensate, uniform and important stimuli for social functioning. The aim of the study was to verify the effects of the SSRI escitalopram on the recognition of facial emotional expressions. Twelve healthy males completed two experimental sessions each (crossover design), in a randomized, balanced order, double-blind design. An oral dose of 10 mg of escitalopram was administered 3 hours before they performed an emotion recognition task with six basic emotions angry, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness and surprise and neutral expression. The faces were digitally morphed between 10% and 100% of each emotional standard, creating a 10% steps gradient. The subjective mood and anxiety states through the task were recorded and the performance through the task was defined by the accuracy measure (number of correct answers divided by the total of stimuli presented). In general, except of fear, escitalopram interfered with all the emotions tested. Specifically, facilitated the recognition of sadness, while impaired the identification of happiness. When the gender of the faces was analyzed, this effect was seen in male, but not female faces, where it improves the recognition of happiness. In addition, improves the recognition of angry and disgusted faces when administered at the second session and impaired the identification of surprised faces at intermediate levels of intensity. It also showed a global positive effect on task performance when administered at the second session. The results indicate a serotonergic modulation on the recognition of emotional faces and the recall of previous learned items.

ASSUNTO(S)

escitalopram expressões faciais emoção. reconhecimento de faces faces recognition facial expression serotonina emotion. serotonin escitalopram

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