Scientific Reports
October 18, 2024
Amit Olami, Leehe Peled‐avron
9 citations
Classic psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and ayahuasca enhance emotional empathy—both explicit and implicit—but do not affect cognitive empathy, according to a meta-analysis of studies up to November 2023. Empathy, the ability to understand and share others' feelings, is crucial for social interaction. The analysis used the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) to measure these effects. The findings suggest a specific role for psychedelics in boosting emotional empathy, highlighting their potential therapeutic value for conditions involving social functioning.
Scientific Reports
November 29, 2025
Leehe Peled‐avron, Jacob S. Aday, Madeline M. Pantoni et al.
1 citation
MDMA enhances emotional empathy but reduces accuracy in recognizing negative facial expressions such as sadness, fear, and anger. No significant effects were found on cognitive empathy or recognition of happy expressions. These findings come from a meta-analysis of studies using the Multifaceted Empathy Test and the Facial Emotion Recognition Task. Understanding these nuanced effects may help optimize therapeutic applications and safety considerations for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, which is currently under regulatory review for post-traumatic stress disorder.
medRxiv
June 22, 2026
Roi Basch, Maya Cohen, Leehe Peled‐avron
Serotonin-boosting treatments, such as SSRIs and psychedelics, consistently reduce repetitive negative thoughts like rumination, worry, and obsessions, but do not reliably improve performance on lab tests of cognitive flexibility. A meta-analysis of 2,030 participants across 45 effect sizes found that acute tryptophan depletion did not impair cognitive flexibility, and serotonin elevation did not enhance it. However, serotonin elevation produced a medium-to-large reduction in pathological perseverative thinking. The effect was stronger in samples with more female participants, and psilocybin showed a marginally larger reduction than SSRIs. The findings suggest serotonin's role in emotional and cognitive rigidity is distinct from its effects on objective executive function.