Background The high prevalence and severity of methamphetamine (MA) abuse demands
greater neurobiological understanding of its etiology. Methods We conducted …

The place conditioning paradigm is an efficient, widely-used method to study mechanisms
that underlie appetitive or aversive learning and memory processes. However …

The rewarding properties of drugs in the mammalian system depend on their ability to
activate appetitive motivational states. The associated underlying mechanism is strongly …

Abstract C57BL/6J and BALB/cJ mice display significant differences in sociability and
response to drugs, but the phenotypic variability of their susceptibility to cocaine is still not …

Conditioned place preference (CPP) is established by pairing a context conditioned stimulus
with an abused drug. With repeated context-drug pairings, the context alone acquires …

Zebra finches are songbirds that learn vocal patterns during a sensitive period of
development that approximates adolescence. Exposure of these animals to a cannabinoid …

Mitragyna speciosa is a tropical plant with narcotic effects. The antinociceptive effects of its
crude extracts, bioactive compounds and structurally modified derivatives have been …

Stress increases the vulnerability to addiction in humans (for review, see Sinha, 2008). In
preclinical studies, stressors can enhance drug self-administration and induce relapse …

Human cocaine users report that the initial “high” produced by cocaine administration is
followed by an anxiogenic “crash”. Given that cocaine has such robust and opposing …

Rodent studies have proposed that adolescent susceptibility to substance use is at least
partly due to adolescents experiencing reduced aversive effects of drugs compared to …