At 15-18 min postinjection we observed in the hydrocortisone group reduced activity in the hippocampus and amygdala that reached a peak response minimum at

25-30 min postinjection (-1 Standard Deviation) relative to placebo. No such effect was seen in the thalamus. Functional MRI appears to be a safe, noninvasive method to study the time course and anatomical effects of glucocorticoids in the human brain. Published by Elsevier Ltd.”
“The stress hormone cortisol is important for the regulation of social motivational processes. High cortisol levels have been associated with social fear and avoidance, which play an important role in social anxiety disorder (SAD), as does hypervigilant processing of social threat. However, causal effects of cortisol on threat processing in SAD remain unclear. In an event-related Rigosertib purchase potential (ERP) study we investigated the effects of cortisol on task-irrelevant (implicit) processing of social threat in SAD, exploring the temporal dynamics as well as the role of symptom severity and stimulus awareness. Ann face processing was measured

selleckchem in participants with clinical SAD after double-blind, within-subject oral administration of cortisol (50 mg) and placebo, using a masked and an unmasked emotional Stroop task. Both tasks showed significantly increased P2 midline ERP amplitudes for angry compared to neutral and happy faces in the placebo condition, reflecting an early attentional bias for social threat in SAD. Furthermore, cortisol administration significantly decreased P2 amplitudes for masked angry faces. This effect correlated with social anxiety, showing stronger decreases in patients with higher levels of social anxiety. These results indicate a highly specific effect of cortisol on early motivated attention to social threat and, together with previous selleck chemicals llc findings, highlight the importance of motivational context (stimulus- or task-relevance) as welt as symptom severity. (c) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Fear

conditioning is influenced by stress but opposing effects in mates and females have often been reported. In a previous human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we observed acute effects of the stress hormone cortisol on prefrontal structures. Men showed evidence for impaired fear conditioning after cortisol treatment, while the opposite pattern was found for women. In the current experiment, we tested whether similar sex-dependent effects would occur on the neural level if contingency awareness was prevented experimentally to investigate implicit learning processes. A differential fear conditioning experiment with transcutaneous electrical stimulation as unconditioned stimulus and geometric figures as conditioned stimuli (CS) was conducted.