Compulsion is a cardinal symptom of drug addiction (severe substance use disorder).
However, compulsion is observed in only a small proportion of individuals who repeatedly …

Behaviours such as eating, copulating, defending oneself or taking addictive drugs begin
with a motivation to initiate the behaviour. Both this motivational drive and the behaviours …

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 …

A decade ago, we hypothesized that drug addiction can be viewed as a transition from
voluntary, recreational drug use to compulsive drug-seeking habits, neurally underpinned by …

Early adolescent substance use dramatically increases the risk of lifelong substance use
disorder (SUD). An adolescent sensitive period evolved to allow the development of risk …

Social development has been the focus of a great deal of neuroscience based research over
the past decade. In this review, we focus on providing a framework for understanding how …

Projections from the lateral hypothalamus (LH) to the ventral tegmental area (VTA),
containing both GABAergic and glutamatergic components, encode conditioned responses …

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 …

We revisit our hypothesis that drug addiction can be viewed as the endpoint of a series of
transitions from initial voluntarily drug use to habitual, and ultimately compulsive drug use …

Human neuroimaging studies suggest that neural cue reactivity is strongly associated with
indices of drug use, including addiction severity and treatment success. However, little is …