Adaptive motivated behavior requires rapid discrimination between beneficial and harmful
stimuli. Such discrimination leads to the generation of either an approach or rejection …

Survival is dictated by an organism's fitness in approaching positive stimuli and avoiding
harm. While a rich literature outlines a role for mesolimbic dopamine in reward and …

Although fear directs adaptive behavioral responses, how aversive cues recruit motivational
neural circuitry is poorly understood. Specifically, while it is known that dopamine (DA) …

Dopamine (DA) is critical for reward processing, but significantly less is known about its role
in punishment avoidance. Using a combined approach-avoidance task, we measured …

An important feature of cocaine addiction in humans is the emergence of negative affect (eg,
dysphoria, irritability, anhedonia), postulated to play a key role in craving and relapse …

Discriminative stimuli (DSs) inform animals that reward can be obtained contingent on the
performance of a specific behavior. Such stimuli reinstate drug‐seeking behavior, evoke …

Mesolimbic dopamine (DA) is phasically released during appetitive behaviors, though there
is substantive disagreement about the specific purpose of these DA signals. For example …

Nucleus accumbens (NAc) neurons encode features of stimulus learning and action
selection associated with rewards. The NAc is necessary for using information about …

The nucleus accumbens (NA) has been hypothesized to be part of a circuit in which cue-
evoked information about expected outcomes is mobilized to guide behavior. Here we …

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is a key node of the brain's circuitry that is responsible for
translating motivation into action. It has been implicated in playing critical roles in virtually all …