Artificially increasing serotonin levels may reduce the perception of negative events.

“Well, the idea would be it makes you less likely to code something as negative because you have less serotonin in the serotonin terminals. And so if they're communicating this information about >> more serotonin in the serotonin terminals. >> Gotcha. So if somebody takes an SSRI, serotonin is increased and they have a tough interaction at work. Uh the idea is that they would encode that cognitively as less bad because there's an abundance of serotonin or worse than it would be had they not been on this drug.”