Effects of glucocorticoid and noradrenergic activity on implicit and explicit facial emotion recognition in healthy young men

Emotion recognition and regulation in males: Role of sex and stress steroids

Understanding emotions in males is crucial given their higher susceptibility to substance use, interpersonal violence, and suicide compared to females. Steroid hormones are assumed to be critical biological factors that affect and modulate emotion-related behaviors, together with psychological and social factors. This review explores whether males' abilities to recognize emotions of others and regulate their own emotions are associated with testosterone, cortisol, and their interaction. Higher levels of testosterone were associated with improved recognition and heightened sensitivity to threatening faces. In contrast, higher cortisol levels positively impacted emotion regulation ability. Indirect evidence from neuroimaging research suggested a link between higher testosterone levels and difficulties in cognitive emotion regulation. However, this notion must be investigated in future studies using different emotion regulation strategies and considering social status. The present review contributes to the understanding of how testosterone and cortisol affect psychological well-being and emotional behavior in males.

Implicit and explicit emotional memory recall in anxiety and depression: Role of basolateral amygdala and cortisol-norepinephrine interaction

Anxiety and depression are linked to both explicit and implicit memory biases, which are defined as the tendency to preferentially recall emotionally negative information at conscious and subconscious levels, respectively. Functional connectivity (FC) of the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and related stress hormones (i.e., cortisol and norepinephrine) are purportedly implicated in these biases. However, previous findings on memory biases in anxiety and depression have been inconsistent, likely due to their symptomatic complications. Therefore, the underlying neurobiological mechanism remains unclear. We thus investigated whether anxiety and depression as premorbid predispositions are related to the memory biases, and whether FC of BLA, cortisol, and 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG: a major metabolite of norepinephrine) would affect the anxiety/depression-related biased memory recall in 100 participants without psychiatric symptomatology. Psycho-behavioral assessment, resting-state fMRI scans, and saliva collection at 10-points-in-time across two days were conducted. Correlations of memory biases with anxiety/depression and neurobiological markers were explored. As a result, neither anxiety nor depression were correlated with explicit memory bias to negative (vs. positive) information, although depression was associated with better recall of the negative stimuli only when they were perceived as self-relevant. In contrast, both anxiety and depression were correlated with implicit memory bias; however, the effects were solely explained by anxiety. Furthermore, FC of the BLA with subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and the synergetic effect of cortisol and MHPG uniquely affected the implicit memory bias. These findings suggest that anxiety facilitates an initial snapshot of negative information and can be accompanied by depression when the information creates negative semantic associations with the self. The BLA-sgACC neural connectivity and cortisol-norepinephrine interaction that are associated with the implicit memory bias might be one of the important neurobiological targets in the prevention and treatment for comorbid anxiety and depressive disorders.