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Enhancement of Healthy Personality Through Psychiatric Medication: The Influence of SSRIs on Neuroticism and Extraversion

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Abstract

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors’ (SSRIs’) wide use, combined with the blurry limit between health and psychological illness, have led neuroscientists, clinicians and ethicists to envision the possibility of these medications’ use in non-clinical populations. This prospect has evoked ethical debates, which have often ignored the findings of the empirical literature. In this context, an evaluation of the empirical evidence for SSRIs’ personality enhancing effects is needed. The present paper examines SSRIs’ effects on healthy personality, including the Five Factor Model traits Neuroticism and Extraversion, as well as some of their facets: Angry Hostility, Impulsiveness, Vulnerability, Warmth, Gregariousness and Assertiveness. The review encompasses investigations in healthy humans, human clinical populations, as well as relevant animal studies. Emerging data raise the possibility that SSRIs, when used by people without a currently diagnosable mental disorder, may reduce some facets of Neuroticism, especially Angry Hostility. On the other hand, very limited support exists for an SSRI-driven change in other Neuroticism facets, such as Impulsiveness, in healthy humans. An increase in Extraversion (potentially, Warmth, Gregariousness, and, in some contexts, Assertiveness) is possible, but currently available evidence is only indirect. Future research is needed, both to clarify methodological ambiguities in existing studies, and to answer unaddressed questions, such as ones of the stability, predictors, moderators, dose- and context-dependency of the effects.

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Notes

  1. The findings of the animal literature should not be automatically discounted as near-irrelevant, given the similarity between animal and human tests of some forms of impulsiveness (e.g., delay discounting) and the commonalities between animals’ and humans’ neurobiology of impulsivity [63]

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Martha Farah, Rob DeRubeis, Geoff Goodwin and Teresa Pegors for their invaluable feedback about this project.

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  1. Psychology Department, University of Pennsylvania, 3720 Walnut Street, Room B51, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Irena Ilieva

  2. Center for Neuroscience and Society, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Irena Ilieva

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Ilieva, I. Enhancement of Healthy Personality Through Psychiatric Medication: The Influence of SSRIs on Neuroticism and Extraversion. Neuroethics 8, 127–137 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-014-9226-z

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