Although it is challenging for individuals with cocaine addiction to achieve abstinence, the
greatest difficulty is avoiding relapse to drug taking, which is often triggered by cues …

Substance use disorders occur commonly in patients with schizophrenia and dramatically
worsen their overall clinical course. While the exact mechanisms contributing to substance …

Reward drives motivated behaviours and is essential for survival, and therefore there is
strong evolutionary pressure to retain contextual information about rewarding stimuli. This …

Excitatory afferents to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) are thought to facilitate reward seeking
by encoding reward-associated cues. Selective activation of different glutamatergic inputs to …

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) and ventral hippocampus (vHPC) have both been
implicated in mediating anxiety-related behaviors, but the functional contribution of BLA …

Impairments in social interaction represent a core symptom of a number of psychiatric
disease states, including autism, schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety. Although the …

Sex differences have been observed across many psychiatric diseases, especially mood
disorders. For major depression, the most prevalent psychiatric disorder, females show a …

While the hippocampal formation and the prefrontal cortex each have a well-established role
in cognitive and mnemonic processes, the extent and manner in which these structures …

Many of the brain's reward systems converge on the nucleus accumbens, a region richly
innervated by excitatory, inhibitory, and modulatory afferents representing the circuitry …

In this article we develop the concept that the hippocampus and the midbrain dopaminergic
neurons of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) form a functional loop. Activation of the loop …