Psychopharmacology

To successfully negotiate the developmental transition between youth and adulthood, adolescents must maneuver this often stressful period while acquiring skills necessary for independence. Certain behavioral features, including age-related increases…

Adolescence is an evolutionarily conserved developmental phase characterized by hormonal, physiological, neural and behavioral alterations evident widely across mammalian species. For instance, adolescent rats, like their human counterparts, exhibit…

Stress is a major risk factor for numerous neuropsychiatric diseases. However, susceptibility to stress and the qualitative nature of stress effects on behavior differ markedly among individuals. This is partly because of the moderating influence of…

RATIONALE: Cannabis is one of the most frequently used substances. Cannabis and its constituent cannabinoids are known to impair several aspects of cognitive function, with the most robust effects on short-term episodic and working memory in humans.…

Nicotine has been suggested to have cognitive enhancing effects. The present study examined the effects of nicotine and the nicotinic antagonist mecamylamine on contextual fear conditioning in C57BL/6 mice. The fear conditioning task was chosen…

The affective response to cocaine (COC) has been suggested to follow a time-course and pattern that adheres to the prediction of opponent-process models of drug actions. While the initial impact of the drug is positive, within a few minutes that…

Many organisms, especially humans, are characterized by their capacity for intentional, goal-directed actions. However, similar behaviours often proceed automatically, as habitual responses to antecedent stimuli. How are goal-directed actions…

Since its conception three decades ago, the idea that the striatum consists of a dorsal sensorimotor part and a ventral portion processing limbic information has sparked a quest for functional correlates and anatomical characteristics of the…

Memory is often considered to be a process that has several stages, including acquisition, consolidation and retrieval. Memory can be modified further through reconsolidation and performance can change during extinction trials while the original…

Pharmacological data clearly indicate that both muscarinic and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors have a role in the encoding of new memories. Localized lesions and antagonist infusions demonstrate the anatomical locus of these cholinergic effects,…

OBJECTIVE: Epidemiological studies indicate that experimentation with addictive drugs and onset of addictive disorders is primarily concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood. The authors describe basic and clinical data supporting adolescent…

Acquisition and storage of aversive memories is one of the basic principles of central nervous systems throughout the animal kingdom. In the absence of reinforcement, the resulting behavioural response will gradually diminish to be finally extinct.…

This article reviews findings up to the end of 1997 about the inducible transcription factors (ITFs) c-Jun, JunB, JunD, c-Fos, FosB, Fra-1, Fra-2, Krox-20 (Egr-2) and Krox-24 (NGFI-A, Egr-1, Zif268); and the constitutive transcription factors (CTFs)…

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia has been one of the most enduring ideas in psychiatry. Initially, the emphasis was on a role of hyperdopaminergia in the etiology of schizophrenia (version I), but it was subsequently reconceptualized to…

During the past several years, evidence has accumulated suggesting a relationship between newly born cells in the hippocampus and various types of learning and memory. However, most of the evidence is correlational and some of it does not agree.…

In the standard model of pavlovian fear learning, sensory input from neutral and aversive stimuli converge in the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA), in which alterations in synaptic transmission encode the association. During fear expression, the…

This review gives an overview of recent findings and developments in research on brain mechanisms of reward and reinforcement from studies using the place preference conditioning paradigm, with emphasis on those studies that have been published…

The primary psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, Delta9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Delta9-THC), affects the brain mainly by activating a specific receptor (CB1). CB1 is expressed at high levels in many brain regions, and several endogenous brain lipids…

Extinction of conditioned fear responses is an active learning process resulting from the repeated presentation of a conditioned stimulus in the absence of the unconditioned aversive stimulus. Recent research implicates the medial prefrontal cortex…

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are critical for using learned representations of outcomes to guide behavior. Neurophysiological findings suggest complementary roles in which the BLA acquires associations between cues…