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Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Advance Access published online on July 23, 2009
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:10.1093/scan/nsp025
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The effect of acute tryptophan depletion on emotional distraction and subsequent memory

Lihong Wang1,2, O’Dhaniel Mullette-Gillman1, Kishore M. Gadde2, Cynthia M. Kuhn3, Gregory McCarthy1,4 and Scott A. Huettel1,5

1Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, 2Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, 3Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, 4Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT and 5Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Serotonin is a key neurotransmitter involved in emotional regulation and memory. A number of studies using acute tryptophan depletion (ATD) in healthy subjects have shown that a temporary serotonin reduction both induces a negative emotional bias and impairs long-term memory. However, little is known about the specific effects of ATD on emotional memory. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the effect of ATD on negative memory and executive function in healthy volunteers. Our emotional oddball task required participants to distinguish infrequently presented targets from distracting negative and neutral pictures. Memory for the distracting pictures was tested 1 h following the fMRI session. ATD selectively enhanced memory for negative distractors relative to neutral distractors and increased activation in response to the negative distractors in the left orbital-inferior frontal, dorsomedial prefrontal and bilateral angular gyri. ATD also induced greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate across all stimuli. Stronger frontal activation to distractors was positively correlated with memory performance on ATD but not control days, indicating a possible compensatory mechanism for coping with increased task demand under the ATD challenge. These findings highlight the importance of serotonin in negative memory with implications for mood disorders.

Keywords: serotonin; emotional memory; negative attentional bias; distraction; fMRI

Correspondence should be addressed to Lihong Wang, Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Duke University Medical Center, 2424 Erwin Road, Suite 501 Durham, NC 27705, USA. E-mail: wang{at}biac.duke.edu.

We thank Brandi Newell for manuscript comments. We also thank the staff of the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center and the Duke Clinical Research Unit for technical support. This research was supported by the Duke Silvio O. Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Depression (P50-MH60451). L.W. is supported by the Paul B. Beeson Career Developmental Awards (K23-AG028982).

Received November 17, 2008. Accepted June 21, 2009.


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