Abstract
Neuro-ethological studies conducted by Panksepp and his colleagues have provided an understanding of how the activity of the mesolimbic dopaminergic (ML DA) system leads to the emotional disposition to SEEK/Explore, which is involved in all appetitive motivated behavior and mental activity. In pathological addiction phenomena, this emotional disposition “fixes” itself on certain obsessive-compulsive habits, losing its versatility and its natural predisposition to spontaneous and unconditioned activation. Overall, the result is a consistent disinterest in everything that is not the object of addiction. From a neuro-psycho-evolutionary point of view, the predisposition to develop addictive behavior can be attributed to a loss of “functional autonomy” of the SEEKING/Explorative disposition. Indeed, as shown by animal and human studies, the tendency to be conditioned by situations and contexts that provide an immediate reward can be closely related to a deficit in the tonic endogenous activity of the ML DA-SEEKING system.
Highlights
According to the American Society of Medicine (American Society of Addiction Medicine, 2011), “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences
We propose a hypothesis that attempts to identify a psycho-biological substrate for individual vulnerability to the development of pathological addiction and connect such predisposition to specific environmental, cultural, and socio-economic factors that characterize our contemporary world
Here, we focus on an endogenous deficit in the mesolimbic dopaminergic (ML DA)-SEEKING system, we do not exclude the intervention of anomalies in other emotional systems
Summary
According to the American Society of Medicine (American Society of Addiction Medicine, 2011), “Addiction is a treatable, chronic medical disease involving complex interactions among brain circuits, genetics, the environment, and an individual’s life experiences. A rat that has learned to walk through a maze to obtain food will execute a particular sequence of movements along the tunnels of the experimental apparatus until reaching the goal The learning process, both in terms of stimulus (classical conditioning) and behavior (operant conditioning), determines a gradual and progressive removal of the functionally autonomous component of the SEEKING/Exploration system, linked to the ventromedial cortico-striatal areas of the DA system and a greater recruitment of the dorsal-lateral regions of the same circuits (Everitt and Robbins, 2005; Alcaro et al, 2007). Stressful environmental conditions, especially social ones, may predispose vulnerable individuals to develop an addiction by inhibiting the spontaneous expression of positive emotional dispositions (SEEKING, PLAY, CARE, and LUST). Those emotions promote and reinforce the influence that the individual exerts on his environment. The pressure that the environment exerts on the individual restricts the range of its actions and favors establishing compulsive habits that act autonomously and independently of the expression of subjective intentionality
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