Endogenous progesterone blurs frontostriatal representations of emotion control in healthy young women

Despite renewed interest, it remains unclear how ovarian hormones shape affect-related brain states. Here, we investigated whether estradiol and progesterone modulate the neural encoding of emotion control in a sample of healthy, naturally-cycling young women (n=116). Participants had to either approach or avoid angry or happy facial expressions during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Responses were slower and less accurate when approaching angry faces or avoiding happy ones, replicating previous findings. At the neural level, task conditions could be reliably decoded from multivoxel activation patterns in the lateral frontal pole (FPl), striatum, central insula, dorsal and ventral cerebellum, primary visual cortex, and periaqueductal gray. Critically, progesterone was associated with reduced classification accuracy in striatum and FPl, which was in turn linked with worse self-reported mood during the preceding week. Our results thus provide robust evidence on the neuroendocrine control of affect in women.