Commonly prescribed drugs affect decisions to harm oneself and others

(University College London) Healthy people given the serotonin-enhancing antidepressant citalopram were willing to pay almost twice as much to prevent harm to themselves or others than those given placebo drugs in a moral decision-making experiment at UCL. In contrast, the dopamine-boosting Parkinson's drug levodopa made healthy people more selfish, eliminating an altruistic tendency to prefer harming themselves over others. The study was a double-blind randomized controlled trial and the results are published in Current Biology.
Source: EurekAlert! - Social and Behavioral Science - Category: Global & Universal Source Type: news