Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

I will examine the interaction between stress and reward from with respect to behaviour and neural circuitry. Rewarding stimuli including food and drugs of abuse activate the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. Cessation of drug intake is associated with the emergence of a negative emotional state in human drug addicts. Furthermore, negative affect or stress is associated with drug-seeking behaviour in human addicts, a phenomena that has been successfully reproduced in animal models of drug seeking, particularly in the reinstatement model of drug seeking. I plan to apply recently developed animal models of cocaine and alcohol dependence to the identification of both pharmacological and environmental factors that predict persistent alterations in reward- and stres-related behavioural performance. Additionally, I will also seek to elucidate the neural mechanisms that accompany these behavioural alterations. These studies will involve both systemic and central administration of ligands into brain regions that have been shown to play important roles in the regulation of both stress and reward and will target novel neurotransmitter systems that are localized primarily in stress- and reward-related brain regions. These studies will focus on identification of the pharmacological mechanisms related to changes in stress and reward-related performance. The results will contribute to the reward and stress literatures and may also have important implications for drug addiction.