Abstract

The serendipitous emergence of MAOI ’s, Tricyclics, and SSR Is catalyzed increased research interest in serotonin. Early methodologies relied on subjective questionnaires to assess primarily treatment efficacy outcomes. Thus little is known still about the impact of serotonin modulation on more objective measures of learning, cognition, and emotion. Problems remain with context-specificity in treatment outcomes, acute vs chronic effects, drug target specificity, and inter-subject variability. While popular culture stereotypes serotonin as the mood neurotransmitter, neuroscience research has yet to find any single coherent functional understanding of 5-HT. Rather, it has found many 5-HT mechanisms and functions, but with a less unified understanding compared to other neuromodulators. I will discuss why psychiatry and neuroscience has yet to find an all-encompassing function of serotonin, some of the difficulties in parsing 5-HT functionality in the literature, some recent research on the role of serotonin in cognitive flexibility, and how future research might more directly target the mechanisms and functions of serotonin in cognition and emotion.