Selective attention to emotional cues and emotion recognition in healthy subjects: the role of mineralocorticoid receptor stimulation

• Published in: Psychopharmacology 2016-09, Vol.233 (18), p.3405-3415
• Main Authors: Schultebraucks, Katharina, Deuter, Christian E., Duesenberg, Moritz, Schulze, Lars, Hellmann-Regen, Julian, Domke, Antonia, Lockenvitz, Lisa, Kuehl, Linn K., Otte, Christian, Wingenfeld, Katja
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adult; Anger; Attention - drug effects; Attentional bias; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Corticosteroids; Cues; Emotions; Face; Facial Expression; Facial Recognition - drug effects; Female; Fludrocortisone - pharmacology; Happiness; Healthy Volunteers; Hormone receptors; Humans; Hydrocortisone; Male; Memory; Neurons; Neurosciences; Original Investigation; Pharmacology/Toxicology; Physiological aspects; Psychiatry; Psychological research; Psychopharmacology; Receptors, Mineralocorticoid - agonists; Social Perception; Stimulants; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0033-3158; 1432-2072
• DOI: 10.1007/s00213-016-4380-0

Rationale Selective attention toward emotional cues and emotion recognition of facial expressions are important aspects of social cognition. Stress modulates social cognition through cortisol, which acts on glucocorticoid (GR) and mineralocorticoid receptors (MR) in the brain. Objectives We examined the role of MR activation on attentional bias toward emotional cues and on emotion recognition. Methods We included 40 healthy young women and 40 healthy young men (mean age 23.9 ± 3.3), who either received 0.4 mg of the MR agonist fludrocortisone or placebo. A dot-probe paradigm was used to test for attentional biases toward emotional cues (happy and sad faces). Moreover, we used a facial emotion recognition task to investigate the ability to recognize emotional valence (anger and sadness) from facial expression in four graded categories of emotional intensity (20, 30, 40, and 80 %). Results In the emotional dot-probe task, we found a main effect of treatment and a treatment × valence interaction. Post hoc analyses revealed an attentional bias away from sad faces after placebo intake and a shift in selective attention toward sad faces compared to placebo. We found no attentional bias toward happy faces after fludrocortisone or placebo intake. In the facial emotion recognition task, there was no main effect of treatment. Conclusions MR stimulation seems to be important in modulating quick, automatic emotional processing, i.e., a shift in selective attention toward negative emotional cues. Our results confirm and extend previous findings of MR function. However, we did not find an effect of MR stimulation on emotion recognition.