Attentional biases to threat and serotonin transporter gene promoter (5-HTLPR) polymorphisms: Evidence from a probe discrimination task with endogenous cues

Abstract

Recent studies have investigated the association between serotonin transporter gene promoter (5-HTTLPR) functional polymorphisms and attentional biases to threat, a cognitive mechanism that probably contributes to the development and maintenance of anxiety. The present study genotyped a sample of N = 141 healthy volunteers for an insertion/deletion polymorphism and the rs25531 single-nucleotide polymorphism in 5-HTTLPR. In order to investigate attentional biases to threat, we used a probe discrimination task in which the gaze direction of centrally presented fearful or neutral faces endogenously cued attention. The results indicated no significant differences in attentional biases to threat between 5-HTTLPR genotype groups. However, we found that carriers of two low-expressing alleles (i.e., S or LG) of 5-HTTLPR displayed a significant slowing of responses across trials with fearful compared to neutral faces. This effect may indicate that fearful faces triggered increased emotional arousal in these genotypes, which may have interfered with the processing of gaze direction and spatial cuing. These results suggest that using fearful faces as endogenous spatial cues may be problematic in genotypes associated with facilitated emotional arousal to these stimuli, and underscore the hypothesis that 5-HTTLPR specifically influences automatic rather than consciously-controlled processes of attention.

Early Experience Affects the Strength of Vigilance for Threat in Rhesus Monkey Infants

“…Infants who possess this same variant often demonstrate impaired emotion regulation and heightened anxiety, but only when exposed to early life adversity (e.g., McCormack et al, 2009;Spinelli et al, 2012). In humans, the serotonin transporter gene polymorphism has been linked to variation in temperament and anxiety (Lakatos et al, 2003), in attentional responses to positive and negative emotional expressions (Pérez-Edgar et al, 2010), and in threat detection (Miu, Vulturar, Chis, & Ungureanu, 2012), which is consistent with the notion that this polymorphism alters an individual's sensitivity to his or her environment (e.g., Caspi, Hariri, Holmes, Uher, & Moffitt, 2010). Therefore, although our results are consistent with an explanation emphasizing the effects of early experience on the development of vigilance for threat, we cannot rule out the possibility that variation in vigilance for threat is primarily, or even solely, due to genetic factors (e.g., maternal genotype acting via maternal behavior or genetic similarities between mothers and infants leading to correlations between maternal characteristics and infant biases in vigilance for threat).…”

Effects of HTR1A rs6295 polymorphism on emotional attentional blink

“…From animal as well as human studies it has become clear that individuals characterized by affective disorders show heightened sensitivity to real or contextually forecast threat. This threat sensitivity has been linked with the possession of the so-called risk variants of the 5-HT related genes (Bigos et al, 2008;Osinsky et al, 2008;Tops et al, 2009;Fisher et al, 2011;Miu et al, 2012;Fisher and Hariri, 2013;Homberg et al, 2016;Kraehenmann et al, 2016;Kroes et al, 2019). One of the genes that has been implicated in the pathophysiology of anxiety and depression is the serotonin 1A receptor encoding gene HTR1A (Lemonde et al, 2003;.…”