Kent Berridge

Arguably, emotion is always valenced-either pleasant or unpleasant-and dependent on the pleasure system. This system serves adaptive evolutionary functions; relying on separable wanting, liking, and learning neural mechanisms mediated by mesocorticolimbic networks driving pleasure cycles with appetitive, consummatory, and satiation phases. Liking is generated in a small set of discrete hedonic hotspots and coldspots, while wanting is linked to dopamine and to larger distributed brain networks. Breakdown of the pleasure system can lead to anhedonia and other features of affective disorders...

Addiction is often characterized by intense motivation for a drug, which may be narrowly focused at the expense of other rewards. Here, we examined the role of amygdala-related circuitry in the amplification and narrowing of motivation focus for intravenous cocaine. We paired optogenetic channelrhodopsin (ChR2) stimulation in either central nucleus of amygdala (CeA) or basolateral amygdala (BLA) of female rats with one particular nose-poke porthole option for earning cocaine infusions (0.3 mg/kg, i.v.). A second alternative porthole earned identical cocaine but without ChR2 stimulation...

Where does normal brain or psychological function end, and pathology begin? The line can be hard to discern, making disease sometimes a tricky word. In addiction, normal 'wanting' processes become distorted and excessive, according to the incentive-sensitization theory. Excessive 'wanting' results from drug-induced neural sensitization changes in underlying brain mesolimbic systems of incentive. 'Brain disease' was never used by the theory, but neural sensitization changes are arguably extreme enough and problematic enough to be called pathological...

The Office of the Surgeon General recently produced its first Report on the consequences of alcohol and drug abuse on health, making several very laudable policy recommendations. The Report also emphasizes the importance of adequate funding for biomedical research, which is good news for both researchers and patients. However, the Report is marred by a biased viewpoint on the psychology and neurobiology of drug addiction. We highlight here four controversial issues that were depicted as facts in the Report, thereby potentially misleading non-expert readers about the current state-of-the-art understanding of the psychology and neurobiology of drug addiction...

Rewards are both "liked" and "wanted," and those 2 words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of "wanting" a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is "liked." Incentive salience or "wanting," a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, "liking," or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine...

The APA Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. One of the 2016 award winners is Kent C. Berridge, who received this award for "outstanding contributions to the understanding of the psychological and neural basis of motivation." Berridge's award citation, biography, and a selected bibliography are presented here. (PsycINFO Database Record...

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Pavlovian cues for rewards can become attractive incentives: approached and 'wanted' as the rewards themselves. The motivational attractiveness of a previously learned cue is not fixed, but can be dynamically amplified during re-encounter by simultaneous activation of brain limbic circuitry. Here it was reported that opioid or dopamine microinjections in the dorsolateral quadrant of the neostriatum (DLS) of rats selectively amplify attraction toward a previously learned Pavlovian cue in an individualized fashion, at the expense of a competing cue...

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) contains a hedonic hotspot in the rostral half of medial shell, where opioid agonist microinjections are known to enhance positive hedonic orofacial reactions to the taste of sucrose ('liking' reactions). Within NAc shell, orexin/hypocretin also has been reported to stimulate food intake and is implicated in reward, whereas blockade of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors by scopolamine suppresses intake and may have anti-reward effects. Here, we show that NAc microinjection of orexin-A in medial shell amplifies the hedonic impact of sucrose taste, but only within the same anatomically rostral site, identical to the opioid hotspot...

Self-grooming is a complex innate behaviour with an evolutionarily conserved sequencing pattern and is one of the most frequently performed behavioural activities in rodents. In this Review, we discuss the neurobiology of rodent self-grooming, and we highlight studies of rodent models of neuropsychiatric disorders--including models of autism spectrum disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder--that have assessed self-grooming phenotypes. We suggest that rodent self-grooming may be a useful measure of repetitive behaviour in such models, and therefore of value to translational psychiatry...

The hedonic value of a sweet food reward, or how much a taste is 'liked', has been suggested to be encoded by neuronal firing in the posterior ventral pallidum (VP). Hedonic impact can be altered by psychological manipulations, such as taste aversion conditioning, which can make an initially pleasant sweet taste become perceived as disgusting. Pairing nausea-inducing LiCl injection as a Pavlovian unconditioned stimulus (UCS) with a novel taste that is normally palatable as the predictive conditioned stimulus (CS+) suffices to induce a learned taste aversion that changes orofacial 'liking' responses to that sweet taste (e...

The study of the neural bases of eating behavior, hunger, and reward has consistently implicated the lateral hypothalamus (LH) and its interactions with mesocorticolimbic circuitry, such as mesolimbic dopamine projections to nucleus accumbens (NAc) and ventral pallidum (VP), in controlling motivation to eat. The NAc and VP play special roles in mediating the hedonic impact ("liking") and motivational incentive salience ("wanting") of food rewards, and their interactions with LH help permit regulatory hunger/satiety modulation of food motivation and reward...

Amphetamine and stress can sensitize mesolimbic dopamine-related systems. In Pavlovian autoshaping, repeated exposure to uncertainty of reward prediction can enhance motivated sign-tracking or attraction to a discrete reward-predicting cue (lever-conditioned stimulus; CS+), as well as produce cross-sensitization to amphetamine. However, it remains unknown how amphetamine sensitization or repeated restraint stress interact with uncertainty in controlling CS+ incentive salience attribution reflected in sign-tracking...

Pleasure is mediated by well-developed mesocorticolimbic circuitry and serves adaptive functions. In affective disorders, anhedonia (lack of pleasure) or dysphoria (negative affect) can result from breakdowns of that hedonic system. Human neuroimaging studies indicate that surprisingly similar circuitry is activated by quite diverse pleasures, suggesting a common neural currency shared by all. Wanting for reward is generated by a large and distributed brain system. Liking, or pleasure itself, is generated by a smaller set of hedonic hot spots within limbic circuitry...

Pavlovian cues associated with junk-foods (caloric, highly sweet, and/or fatty foods), like the smell of brownies, can elicit craving to eat and increase the amount of food consumed. People who are more susceptible to these motivational effects of food cues may have a higher risk for becoming obese. Further, overconsumption of junk-foods leading to the development of obesity may itself heighten attraction to food cues. Here, we used a model of individual susceptibility to junk-foods diet-induced obesity to determine whether there are pre-existing and/or diet-induced increases in attraction to and motivation for sucrose-paired cues (ie, incentive salience or 'wanting')...

Although AgRP and POMC neurons in the hypothalamus have long been associated with regulation of food intake, in this issue of Cell, Chen et al. use direct imaging in vivo to demonstrate rapid changes in their activity upon food presentation. The rapidity of their altered responses challenges classic notions of their functions and raises new hypotheses.

Choosing one reward above another is important for achieving adaptive life goals. Yet hijacked into excessive intensity in disorders such as addiction, single-minded pursuit becomes maladaptive. Here, we report that optogenetic channelrhodopsin stimulation of neurons in central nucleus of amygdala (CeA), paired with earning a particular sucrose reward in rats, amplified and narrowed incentive motivation to that single reward target. Therefore, CeA rats chose and intensely pursued only the laser-paired sucrose reward while ignoring an equally good sucrose alternative...

This article summarizes presentations from “Neurocognition: The Food–Brain Connection” symposium held at the ASN Scientific Sessions and Annual Meeting at Experimental Biology 2014 in San Diego, CA on 28 April 2014. Presenters reviewed research from several disciplines, including neurobiology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuroscience, and nutrition, concerning the role of the brain in food-intake regulation, reward, and addiction. A transdisciplinary approach was taken to evaluate the state of the science regarding addiction models, as well as research gaps and future research necessary to understand neurocircuitry and pathways involved in food-intake control and behavior in humans...

This chapter examines brain mechanisms of reward utility operating at particular decision moments in life-moments such as when one encounters an image, sound, scent, or other cue associated in the past with a particular reward or perhaps just when one vividly imagines that cue. Such a cue can often trigger a sudden motivational urge to pursue its reward and sometimes a decision to do so. Drawing on a utility taxonomy that distinguishes among subtypes of reward utility-predicted utility, decision utility, experienced utility, and remembered utility-it is shown how cue-triggered cravings, such as an addict's surrender to relapse, can hang on special transformations by brain mesolimbic systems of one utility subtype, namely, decision utility...

Disgust is a prototypical type of negative affect. In animal models of excessive disgust, only a few brain sites are known in which localized dysfunction (lesions or neural inactivations) can induce intense 'disgust reactions' (e.g. gapes) to a normally pleasant sensation such as sweetness. Here, we aimed to map forebrain candidates more precisely, to identify where either local neuronal damage (excitotoxin lesions) or local pharmacological inactivation (muscimol/baclofen microinjections) caused rats to show excessive sensory disgust reactions to sucrose...