Background: Reward expectation is an important motivation for aggression. However, despite substantial progress in behavioral studies related to reward expectation in aggression, the neural basis underlying this process remains unclear. Methods: To i...
The human reward network consists of interconnected brain regions that process stimuli associated with satisfaction and modulate pleasure-seeking behaviors. Impairments in reward processing have been implicated in several medical and psychiatric cond...
Brain stimulation therapies may be used to correct motor, social, emotional, and cognitive consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Neuromodulation applied with anatomical specificity can ameliorate desired symptoms while leaving functional circ...
A growing body of evidence suggests that nucleus accumbens (NAc) plays a significant role not only in the physiological processes associated with reward and satisfaction but also in many diseases of the central nervous system. Summary of the current...
Artificial sweeteners, or non-caloric sweeteners (NCSs), are widely consumed as sugar substitutes to reduce energy intake and manage obesity. Once considered inert, accumulating evidence now shows that NCSs interact with host physiology, altering gut...
(1) Background: Reward responsiveness (RR) is a risk factor for high-risk behaviors such as aggressive behaviors and early sexual initiation, which are all reported to be higher in African American and low socioeconomic status adolescents. At the sam...
30 April 2022
In 2021, over 100,000 people died prematurely from opioid overdoses. Neuropsychiatric and cognitive impairments are underreported comorbidities of reward dysregulation due to genetic antecedents and epigenetic insults. Recent genome-wide association...
Brain-stimulation reward, also known as intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS), is a commonly used procedure for studying brain reward function and drug reward. In electrical ICSS (eICSS), an electrode is surgically implanted into the medial forebrain...
When “hijacked” by compulsive behaviors that affect the reward and stress centers of the brain, functional changes in the dopamine circuitry occur as the consequence of pathological brain adaptation. As a brain correlate of mental health,...
A unified theory of emotion and motivation is updated in which motivational states are states in which instrumental goal-directed actions are performed to obtain anticipated rewards or avoid punishers, and emotional states are states that are elicite...
Music is a universal feature of human societies, which suggests that an evolutionary perspective should help us understand our appreciation. The reward (pleasure) system of the brain offers a suitable framework. The question is why we evolved rewards...
Reward Deficiency Syndrome (RDS) is defined as a breakdown of reward neurotransmission that results in a wide range of addictive, compulsive, and impulsive behaviors. RDS is caused by a combination of environmental (epigenetic) influences and DNA-bas...
Food intake regulation in humans is a complex process controlled by the dynamic interaction of homeostatic and hedonic systems. Homeostatic regulation is controlled by appetitive signals from the gut, adipose tissue, and the vagus nerve, while consci...
The functional interplay between the corticolimbic GABAergic and opioidergic systems plays a crucial role in regulating the reward system and cognitive aspects of motivational behaviors leading to the development of addictive behaviors and disorders....
Major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disability and suicide worldwide. Consecutive rounds of conventional interventions are ineffective in a significant sub-group of patients whose disorder is classified as treatment-resistant depression....
Listening to music is above all a human experience, which becomes an aesthetic experience when an individual immerses himself/herself in the music, dedicating attention to perceptual-cognitive-affective interpretation and evaluation. The study of the...
Substance use disorders (SUDs) remain a major public health challenge, with existing pharmacotherapies offering limited long-term efficacy. Traditional treatments focus on dopaminergic systems but often overlook the complex interplay between metaboli...
Much of what we have learnt from rodent models about the essential role of epigenetic processes in brain plasticity has made use of aversive learning, yet the role of histone acetylation in aversive memory in the honey bee, a popular invertebrate mod...
Obesity is a complex disorder, and the number of people affected is growing every day. In recent years, research has confirmed the hypothesis that food addiction is a determining factor in obesity. Food addiction is a behavioral disorder characterize...
More than a decade ago, deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the superolateral medial forebrain bundle (slMFB), as part of the greater MFB system, had been proposed as a putative yet experimental treatment strategy for therapy refractory depression (TRD)...
Ghrelin is the only known peripherally-derived orexigenic hormone, increasing appetite and subsequent food intake. The ghrelinergic system has therefore received considerable attention as a therapeutic target to reduce appetite in obesity as well as...
Obesity is highly prevalent in patients with schizophrenia and, in association with metabolic syndrome, contributes to premature deaths of patients due to cardiovascular disease complications. Moreover, pharmacologic, and behavioral interventions hav...
Acupuncture affects the central nervous system via the regulation of neurotransmitter transmission. We previously showed that Shemen (HT7) acupoint stimulation decreased cocaine-induced dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens. Here, we used the int...
Advancing treatment to resolve human cognitive disorders requires a comprehensive understanding of the molecular signaling pathways underlying learning and memory. While most organ systems evolved to maintain homeostasis, the brain developed the capa...
While opioids are a powerful class of drugs that inhibit transmission of pain signals, their use is tarnished by the current epidemic of opioid use disorder (OUD) and overdose deaths. Notwithstanding published reports, there remain gaps in our knowle...
Background/Objectives: Experimental studies show that when an individual makes choices, they affect future decisions. Future choices tend to be consistent with past ones. This tendency matters in the context of ambivalent situations because they may...
Evolutionary theory is applied to recent neuroscientific findings on factors associated with risk-and-reward systems, and consequently, aspects of human decision making in spaceflight. Factors include enzymes aiding metabolic pathways of dopamine and...
Background: Adolescent cannabis use (CU) is associated with adverse health outcomes and may be increasing in response to changing cannabis laws. Recent imaging studies have identified differences in brain activity between adult CU and controls that a...
Obesity is becoming one of the major global health concerns. This chronic disease affects around 650 million people worldwide and is an underlying cause of a number of significant comorbidities. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) report...
Harmful alcohol use is responsible for a group of disorders collectively named alcohol use disorders (AUDs), according to the DSM-5 classification. The damage induced by alcohol depends on the amount, time, and consumption patterns (continuous and he...
Gut bacteria influence neural circuits in addiction-related behaviors. Given the association between opioid use, gastrointestinal distress, and microbial dysbiosis in humans and mice, we test the hypothesis that interactions between gut bacteria and...
The origin of spontaneous preference for dietary lipids in humans and rodents is debated, though recent compelling evidence has shown the existence of fat taste that might be considered a sixth taste quality. We investigated the implication of gustat...
Obesity has reached epidemic proportions, motivating research into the underlying mechanisms. Olfaction is a powerful mediator of food consumption, and obesity has been associated with altered olfactory sensitivity. The current study used an event-re...
The main neurotransmitters in the brain—dopamine, γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate, and opioids—are recognized to be the most important for the regulation of aggression and addiction. The aim of this work was to study different...
The cannabinoid system is independently affected by stress and chronic ethanol exposure. However, the extent to which co-occurrence of traumatic stress and chronic ethanol exposure modulates the cannabinoid system remains unclear. We examined levels...
Obesity is now a public health concern. The leading cause of obesity is an energy imbalance between ingested and expended calories. The mechanisms of feeding behavior and energy metabolism are regulated by a complex of various kinds of molecules, inc...
The debate on personality structure and behavioral addictions is an outstanding issue. According to some authors, behavioral addictions could arise from a premorbid personality, while for others, it could result from a pathological use of technologic...
Gut-brain signaling controls food intake and energy homeostasis, and its activity is thought to be dysregulated in obesity. We will explore new studies that suggest the endocannabinoid (eCB) system in the upper gastrointestinal tract plays an importa...
Happiness, or life satisfaction, has become an important factor when considering what should be the objective of a society. Understanding the nature of happiness is thus important. The text offers a biological—specifically evolutionary—fr...
13 September 2021
Background: Problematic smartphone use is highly prevalent in adolescent populations compared to other age groups (e.g., adults and young children). Previous studies suggested that higher levels of reward sensitivity were associated with problematic...
Social life is a key feature in humans; without it, language, science, and technology would not have appeared. The inclination to engage with others is also a main source of pleasure and pain and as such a key factor for quality of life. In this pape...
Tobacco smoking is the most frequent form of substance abuse. We provide a review of the neuroadaptive changes evidenced in human smokers with regard to the current neurobiological models of addiction. Addiction is thought to result from an interplay...
Classification is an important task of machine intelligence in the field of information. The artificial neural network (ANN) is widely used for classification. However, the traditional ANN shows slow training speed, and it is hard to meet the real-ti...
Obesity and overweight are a major public health problem globally. Diet quality is critical for proper child development, and an unhealthy diet is a preventable risk factor for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), such as obesity. Consumption of sugar-sw...
Introduction: Obesity is a global health problem requiring effective interventions to achieve weight loss and maintain it in the long term. A major challenge for clinicians is weight regain (WR), defined as progressive weight gain following successfu...
It is well known that exercise produces analgesic effects (exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH)) in animal models and chronic pain patients, but the brain mechanisms underlying these EIH effects, especially concerning the emotional aspects of pain, are...
Changes in gene expression in carps’ brains over time following acute stressors has not been studied in detail so far. Consequently, a stress trial with juvenile common carp was conducted to investigate transcriptomic differences in four brain...
The objective was to assess the effects of a weight loss and subsequent weight maintenance period comprising two diets differing in protein intake, on brain reward reactivity to visual food cues. Brain reward reactivity was assessed with functional m...
Having a family history of alcohol use problems (FH+) conveys risk for alcohol use in offspring. Reward-related brain functioning may play a role in this vulnerability. The present study investigated brain function in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) ass...
The reward system involved in hedonic food intake presents neuronal and behavioral dysregulations during obesity. Moreover, gut microbiota dysbiosis during obesity promotes low-grade inflammation in peripheral organs and in the brain contributing to...
of 9