Tobacco smoking is a major determinant of preventable morbidity and mortality worldwide.
More than a billion people smoke, and without major increases in cessation, at least half will …

Drug addiction represents a dramatic dysregulation of motivational circuits that is caused by
a combination of exaggerated incentive salience and habit formation, reward deficits and …

Interoception, the sense of the body's internal physiological state, underpins homeostatic
reflexes, motivational states, and sensations contributing to emotional experiences. The …

Adolescence encompasses a sensitive developmental period of enhanced clinical
vulnerability to nicotine, tobacco, and e‐cigarettes. While there are sociocultural influences …

Acetylcholine in the brain alters neuronal excitability, influences synaptic transmission,
induces synaptic plasticity, and coordinates firing of groups of neurons. As a result, it …

Psychiatric disorders are among the most intractable enigmas in medicine. In the past 5
years, there has been unprecedented progress on the genetics of many of these conditions …

Drug addiction and obesity appear to share several properties. Both can be defined as
disorders in which the saliency of a specific type of reward (food or drug) becomes …

Neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) regulate the rewarding actions of
nicotine contained in tobacco that establish and maintain the smoking habit. nAChRs also …

Relief, the appetitive state after the termination of aversive stimuli, is evolutionarily
conserved. Understanding the behavioral role of this well-conserved phenomenon and its …

The brain reward circuit has a central role in reinforcing behaviors that are rewarding and
preventing behaviors that lead to punishment. Recent work has shown that the lateral …