Anhedonia—the loss of pleasure or lack of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli—remains a
formidable treatment challenge across neuropsychiatric disorders. In major depressive …

The conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm is a well-established model utilized to
study the role of context associations in reward-related behaviors, including both natural …

Allostasis, or stability through change, has most often been linked with challenges to
homeostasis, in which repeated challenges or stressors produce sufficient allostatic load to …

Evolution has endowed all humans with a continuum of innate, hard-wired, automatically
activated defense behaviors, termed the defense cascade. Arousal is the first step in …

What is the defining property of addiction? We dust off a several-decades-long debate about
the relative importance of two forms of reinforcement—positive reinforcement, subjectively …

The mesocorticolimbic pathway is canonically known as the" reward pathway." Embedded
within the center of this circuit is the striatum, a massive and complex network hub that …

Emotions are “feeling” states and classic physiological emotive responses that are
interpreted based on the history of the organism and the context. Motivation is a persistent …

Drug addiction has been conceptualized as a chronically relapsing disorder of compulsive
drug seeking and taking that progresses through three stages: binge/intoxication …

Social isolation during opioid withdrawal is a major contributor to the current opioid
addiction crisis. We find that sociability deficits during protracted opioid withdrawal in mice …

The roles of opioid receptors in pain and addiction have been extensively studied, but their
function in mood disorders has received less attention. Accumulating evidence from animal …