Abstract

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/YiBXqfTzwEA

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Serotonin is said to be ‘involved in everything but responsible for nothing’. Indeed, serotonin is involved in mood, emotion, learning, cognition, neural development, emesis, appetite, sex, sleep, pain, migraine, sensation and perception, and gastrointestinal, endocrine, motor, and vascular function. Serotonin is thought to have a role in diverse psychiatric conditions including depression, anxiety, panic, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and mental phenomena relevant to various disorders such as impulsivity, compulsivity, aggression, and social cognition. Many of the most commonly used drugs to treat mental illness act through serotonin. In this talk, I will review some of the complexities of serotonin, present recent findings on the role of serotonin in affective and behavioural control in humans, connect these results to the non-human animal literature, and demonstrate how these lines of enquiry are relevant for understanding a wide range of neuropsychiatric disorders. Results will be placed in the context of existing influential views of serotonin function in the central nervous system.