Stroud, JB;
Freeman, TP;
Leech, R;
Hindocha, C;
Lawn, W;
Nutt, DJ;
Curran, HV;
(2018)
Psilocybin with psychological support improves emotional face recognition in treatment-resistant depression.
Psychopharmacology
, 235
(2)
pp. 459-466.
10.1007/s00213-017-4754-y.
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Abstract
RATIONALE: Depressed patients robustly exhibit affective biases in emotional processing which are altered by SSRIs and predict clinical outcome. OBJECTIVES: The 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. METHODS: Seventeen 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. RESULTS: We 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). CONCLUSIONS: Psilocybin 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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Psilocybin with psychological support improves emotional face recognition in treatment-resistant depression |
| Location: | Germany |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s00213-017-4754-y |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-017-4754-y |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
| Keywords: | Anhedonia, Emotional face recognition, Psilocybin, Treatment-resistant depression |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10034334 |
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