Back
The transition to compulsion in addiction.
Journal article

The transition to compulsion in addiction.

  • Lüscher C Department of Basic Neurosciences, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. christian.luscher@unige.ch.
  • Robbins TW Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. twr2@cam.ac.uk.
  • Everitt BJ Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. bje10@cam.ac.uk.
  • 2020-04-02
Published in:
  • Nature reviews. Neuroscience. - 2020
Animals
Behavior, Addictive
Compulsive Behavior
Drug-Seeking Behavior
Humans
Neural Pathways
Reinforcement, Psychology
Substance-Related Disorders
English Compulsion is a cardinal symptom of drug addiction (severe substance use disorder). However, compulsion is observed in only a small proportion of individuals who repeatedly seek and use addictive substances. Here, we integrate accounts of the neuropharmacological mechanisms that underlie the transition to compulsion with overarching learning theories, to outline how compulsion develops in addiction. Importantly, we emphasize the conceptual distinctions between compulsive drug-seeking behaviour and compulsive drug-taking behaviour (that is, use). In the latter, an individual cannot stop using a drug despite major negative consequences, possibly reflecting an imbalance in frontostriatal circuits that encode reward and aversion. By contrast, an individual may compulsively seek drugs (that is, persist in seeking drugs despite the negative consequences of doing so) when the neural systems that underlie habitual behaviour dominate goal-directed behavioural systems, and when executive control over this maladaptive behaviour is diminished. This distinction between different aspects of addiction may help to identify its neural substrates and new treatment strategies.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/271705
Statistics
Document views: 27 File downloads: