This project is designed to investigate the effects of drugs of abuse on affective responses to stimuli with positive or negative emotional valence. The studies explore the hypothesis that drugs modulate responses to affective stimuli, and that these effects, in turn, influence the drugs'subjective or reinforcing effects. We will study bidirectional interactions between acute effects of stimulants, alcohol and cannabinoids on affective responses. The studies focus in particular on affective responses to stimuli with social content, to investigate the idea that drugs influence the perception and valence of social stimuli. We will assess the effects of drugs on responses to positive or negative visual images, including images with social or nonsocial content. In addition, we will investigate drug the effects of drugs in real-life positive or negative social situations. In all studies we will compare these emotional responses in men and women. This innovative approach bridges the area of neuropsychopharmacology with affective neuroscience, and if successful, will extend our understanding of the processes that lead to compulsive drug-seeking behavior.
It is usually thought that people use and abuse drugs because the drugs produce feelings of wellbeing, but drugs also may influence behavior by making emotionally positive stimuli or events appear to be more positive, or by making negative stimuli or events less negative. We will investigate the direct effects of drugs on emotional responses, using both pleasant and unpleasant stimuli, and social and nonsocial stimuli. We will study social content because social behavior and drug rewards share some of the same brain circuits, and we will compare the drugs'effects on emotional responses in men and women because there may be sex differences in these effects.
| Doss, Manoj K; Weafer, Jessica; Gallo, David A et al. (2018) MDMA Impairs Both the Encoding and Retrieval of Emotional Recollections. Neuropsychopharmacology 43:791-800 |
| Bershad, Anya K; Miller, Melissa A; Norman, Greg J et al. (2018) Effects of opioid- and non-opioid analgesics on responses to psychosocial stress in humans. Horm Behav 102:41-47 |
| Vena, Ashley; King, Andrea; Lee, Royce et al. (2018) Intranasal Oxytocin Does Not Modulate Responses to Alcohol in Social Drinkers. Alcohol Clin Exp Res 42:1725-1734 |
| de Wit, Harriet; Sayette, Michael (2018) Considering the context: social factors in responses to drugs in humans. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 235:935-945 |
| Doss, Manoj K; Weafer, Jessica; Ruiz, Nicholas A et al. (2018) Alcohol and pharmacologically similar sedatives impair encoding and facilitate consolidation of both recollection and familiarity in episodic memory. Cogn Neurosci 9:89-99 |
| de Wit, Harriet; Epstein, David H; Preston, Kenzie L (2018) Does human language limit translatability of clinical and preclinical addiction research? Neuropsychopharmacology 43:1985-1988 |
| Crane, Natania A; Gorka, Stephanie M; Weafer, Jessica et al. (2018) Neural activation to monetary reward is associated with amphetamine reward sensitivity. Neuropsychopharmacology 43:1738-1744 |
| Childs, Emma; Astur, Robert S; de Wit, Harriet (2017) Virtual reality conditioned place preference using monetary reward. Behav Brain Res 322:110-114 |
| Bershad, Anya K; Miller, Melissa A; de Wit, Harriet (2017) MDMA does not alter responses to the Trier Social Stress Test in humans. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 234:2159-2166 |
| Weafer, Jessica; Lyon, Nicholas; Hedeker, Donald et al. (2017) Sweet taste liking is associated with subjective response to amphetamine in women but not men. Psychopharmacology (Berl) 234:3185-3194 |
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