TY  - JOUR
A1  - Schultebraucks, Katharina
A1  - Deuter, Christian E.
A1  - Duesenberg, Moritz
A1  - Schulze, Lars
A1  - Hellmann-Regen, Julian
A1  - Domke, Antonia
A1  - Lockenvitz, Lisa
A1  - Kuehl, Linn K.
A1  - Otte, Christian
A1  - Wingenfeld, Katja
T1  - Selective attention to emotional cues and emotion recognition in healthy subjects: the role of mineralocorticoid receptor stimulation
JF  - Psychopharmacology
N2  - 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. We examined the role of MR activation on attentional bias toward emotional cues and on emotion recognition. 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 %). In the emotional dot-probe task, we found a main effect of treatment and a treatment x 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. 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.
KW  - Selective attention
KW  - Emotion recognition
KW  - Fludrocortisone
KW  - Mineralocorticoid receptor
KW  - Stress
KW  - Cortisol
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-016-4380-0
SN  - 0033-3158
SN  - 1432-2072
VL  - 233
SP  - 3405
EP  - 3415
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
ER  -