The Effect of Psilocybin on Emotion Recognition in a Dynamic Emotional Morphing Task (healthy subjects)

Abstract

This preregistration outlines the planned confirmatory and exploratory analyses for evaluating psilocybin’s effects on emotion recognition, using behavioral data from two placebo-controlled sessions (in the fMRI arm) of a completed clinical trial (EudraCT No. 2012004579-37). The trial was conducted at the Psychedelic Research Center of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Prague, Czech Republic (see Klučková et al., 2025 for a summary), and was approved by the Ethical Committee of the NIMH–CZ and the Czech State Institute for Drug Control. Psilocybin, a predominantly serotonergic psychedelic (Nichols, 2016), has been studied primarily for its acute (approximately 2 hours post-ingestion) and longer-term (approximately 1 week post-ingestion) effects on emotions, social cognition, and neural network activity (e.g., Berkovitch et al., 2025; Meshkat et al., 2024). In this within-subject randomized crossover trial, the impact of a single psilocybin dose (0.26 mg/kg) versus placebo was tested on emotion recognition performance. Specifically, trial-level reaction time and accuracy during the subacute phase (approximately 4.5 hours post-ingestion) were recorded using a custom-programmed yet validated dynamic emotional morphing task. Full emotion recognition datasets (i.e., participant data from both sessions) are available for 22 individuals and are analyzed here for the first time.

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