Incentive salience: a motivational theory of addiciton
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Authors
Cussen, Autumn M.
Issue Date
2012
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Not all individuals who try a potentially addictive drug, or even a ‘hard drug’,
become addicted. What causes the transition from ‘user’ to ‘addict’ in certain individuals
has been long debated. The incentive salience hypothesis is one explanation to this
question. According to this hypothesis, drugs cause many psychological changes in the
brain. Of these changes, the most important is ‘sensitization’ or hypersensitivity to the
incentive motivational effects of drugs and drug-associated stimuli. Incentive
sensitization produces a bias of attentional processing towards drug-associated stimuli
and a pathological motivation for drugs (compulsive ‘wanting’). Additionally, there are
three psychological processes that compose incentive motivation and reward. Hedonic
(pleasure) activation by a US (usually a reward, for addicts it’s the ‘drug high’),
associative learning of the correlation between the cue CS and US, and attribution of
incentive salience to the CS are all needed for incentive salience to occur. In this
experiment, we used a non-specific dopamine antagonist, flupenthixol, to test the role of
dopamine in reward and in incentive salience. If dopamine works in reward as the
hypothesis predicts, then animals without dopamine would be able to produce hedonic
responses and associative learning between the cue and reward but they would not be
able to attribute incentive salience. Thus, once flupenthixol is removed animals should be
able to perform all three aspects of the incentive salience hypothesis because none of the
components are now blocked. Our results did not provide any significant results thus,
future studies are needed to examine this hypothesis and its role in reward further.
Description
v, 33 p.
Citation
Publisher
Kalamazoo College
License
U.S. copyright laws protect this material. Commercial use or distribution of this material is not permitted without prior written permission of the copyright holder.