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Serotonin and dopamine have been suggested to subserve motivationally opponent functions, but until recently this hypothesis was untested. I will present a study in which we investigated the dissociable roles of these neurotransmitters in a probabilistic reversal learning paradigm in nearly 700 individuals as a function of genetic variation in the serotonin and dopamine systems. I will then zoom in on serotonin, whose role in motivation processing is much less well understood than for dopamine, and present two pharmacological and a genetics neuroimaging study, in which we investigated the role of serotonin at the interface of aversive processing and behavioural inhibition.