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The rat conditioned avoidance response model is a well-established preclinical behavioral model predictive of antipsychotic efficacy. All clinically approved antipsychotic drugs disrupt conditioned avoidance responding – a feature that distinguishes them from other psychotherapeutics. We previously showed that the typical antipsychotic drug haloperidol disrupts avoidance responding by progressively attenuating the motivational salience of the conditioned stimulus (CS) in normal rats. In this study, using two pharmacological rat models of schizophrenia [e.g. phencyclidine (PCP) or amphetamine sensitization], we examined whether atypicals such as olanzapine or risperidone disrupt avoidance responding through the same behavioral mechanism. Rats were first pretreated with PCP, amphetamine, or saline under one of two different injection schedules for either 1 or 3 weeks. They were then trained to acquire avoidance responding to two types of CS (CS1 and CS2) that differed in their ability to predict the occurrence of the unconditioned stimulus. Finally, rats were tested repeatedly under olanzapine (1.0 mg/kg, subcutaneously) or risperidone (0.33 mg/kg, subcutaneously) daily for 5 or 7 consecutive days. We found that repeated olanzapine or risperidone treatment produced a progressive across-session decline in avoidance responding to both CS1 and CS2. Olanzapine and risperidone disrupted the CS2 (a less salient CS) avoidance to a greater extent than the CS1 avoidance. Pretreatment with PCP and amphetamine did not affect the disruptive effect of olanzapine or risperidone on avoidance responding. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that the atypical drugs olanzapine and risperidone, like the typical drug haloperidol, also disrupt avoidance responding primarily by attenuating the motivational salience of the CS.

Adolescence is a transitional period during development that is associated with a greater likelihood of addiction to drugs than any other age. One possibility for this observation is that learned associations between the rewarding experience of drugs and drug-related cues may produce greater motivational salience, and thus are more difficult to extinguish. Using an unbiased place-conditioning paradigm with two doses of cocaine (10 mg/kg or 20 mg/kg), the authors show here that adolescents require 75 +/- 17% more extinction trials than adults to extinguish cocaine place-preferences. Furthermore, once extinguished, adolescents display a greater preference for a previously cocaine-paired environment upon drug-primed reinstatement compared with adults. These results suggest that adolescent vulnerability to addiction involves robust memories for drug-associated cues that are difficult to extinguish. Therefore, drug-addicted adolescents may have a higher risk of relapse than adults, leading to greater prevalence of addiction in this population.

AimThe aim of this study was to understand the possible influence of personality traits on the importance and significance of perception of body image and self-awareness of appearance in individuals.Method214 online recruited subjects between the ages of 17 and 64 years answered to a socio-demographic questionnaire, the Portuguese version of the instruments NEO-FFI (NEO-Five Factor Inventory), ASI-R (The Appearance Schemas Inventory – Revised) and DAS-24 (Derriford Appearance Scale – short).ResultsIt was found that age, Neuroticism and Agreeableness dimensions significantly influence an individual's investment in body image and self-awareness of appearance. Sexual orientations differed with regard to Self-Evaluative Salience and Self-Consciousness of Appearance.ConclusionThe performed analysis showed that neuroticism and agreeableness are related to Self-Evaluative Salience and Self-Consciousness of Appearance.

Drug-associated cues exposure to induce extinction is a useful strategy to contrast cue-induced drug seeking. Treatments aimed at reducing motivational properties of cues are considered highly promising since they could decrease their ability to induce drug-conditioned behaviors. Norepinephrine (NE) in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for attribution of motivational salience to highly salient stimuli, suggesting a major role in prelimbic (PL) mpFC to modulate the motivational properties of drug-related cues, invigorating them, and consequently, delaying extinction. To investigate if NE in PL fosters the maintenance of drug-seeking behavior, we assessed its role on amphetamine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP). Moreover, to affirm the specificity of NE in PL, we also assessed the role of NE in the infralimbic (IL) mPFC. The effects of selective NE depletion in the PL or in the IL of C57BL/6J mice were assessed on the expression of amphetamine-induced CPP before and after extinction procedure. NE-depleted mice in PL extinguished preference for Amph-paired chamber long before sham animals. By contrast, IL-depleted animals maintained place preference for more than 4 weeks after the procedure of extinction, having at that moment interrupted the test. Inactivation of NE in PL cortex blunts amphetamine-induced CPP, thus fostering extinction and showing to be critical for the maintenance of conditioned Amph-seeking behavior. Opposite effects of NE depletion in IL, seemingly in agreement with literature on extinction, are discussed in terms of balance of activity between PL and IL in extinction.

Dopamine neurotransmission has long been identified as a key component of prefrontal cortical function and flexible cognition; however, flexible behavior does not depend solely on dopamine. Together, multiple systems allow fast and flexible behavior in the face of a constantly changing environment. This Research Topic illuminates work by researchers who are leading efforts to understand how different neural systems yield flexible behavior.

Human prosociality is often assumed to emerge from exerting reflective control over initial, selfish impulses. However, recent findings suggest that prosocial actions can also stem from processes that are fast, automatic and intuitive. Here, we attempt to clarify when prosocial behavior may be intuitive by examining prosociality as a form of reward seeking. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we explored whether a neural signature that rapidly encodes the motivational salience of an event-the P300-can predict intuitive prosocial motivation. Participants allocated varying amounts of money between themselves and charities they initially labelled as high- or low-empathy targets under conditions that promoted intuitive or reflective decision making. Consistent with our predictions, P300 amplitude over centroparietal regions was greater when giving involved high-empathy targets than low-empathy targets, but only when deciding under intuitive conditions. Reflective conditions, alternatively, elicited an earlier frontocentral positivity related to response inhibition, regardless of target. Our findings suggest that during prosocial decision making, larger P300 amplitude could (i) signal intuitive prosocial motivation and (ii) predict subsequent engagement in prosocial behavior. This work offers novel insight into when prosociality may be driven by intuitive processes and the roots of such behaviors.

The factors that contribute to individual differences in the reward value of cute infant facial characteristics are poorly understood. Here we show that the effect of cuteness on a behavioural measure of the reward value of infant faces is greater among women reporting strong maternal tendencies. By contrast, maternal tendencies did not predict women's subjective ratings of the cuteness of these infant faces. These results show, for the first time, that the reward value of infant facial cuteness is greater among women who report being more interested in interacting with infants, implicating maternal tendencies in individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness. Moreover, our results indicate that the relationship between maternal tendencies and the reward value of infant facial cuteness is not due to individual differences in women's ability to detect infant cuteness. This latter result suggests that individual differences in the reward value of infant cuteness are not simply a by-product of low-cost, functionless biases in the visual system.

The purpose of this study was to (a) describe peer relationship profiles of youth sport participants and (b) assess the motivational salience of these profiles by examining profile group differences on sport motivation-related variables. Youth sport camp participants (N = 243) ages 10 to 14 years (M = 11.8, SD = 1.2) completed a multisection questionnaire that contained sport-contextualized measures of perceived friendship quality (positive, conflict), perceived peer acceptance, perceived competence, enjoyment, anxiety, self-presentational concerns, and self-determined motivation. The positive friendship quality, friendship conflict, and peer acceptance responses were cluster-analyzed, yielding five peer relationship profiles that were consistent with expectations based on previous research (i.e., Seidman et al., 1999). Profile differences were obtained for all motivation-related variables and were in theoretically consistent directions. Those young athletes categorized in more adaptive peer relationship profiles had more adaptive motivation-related responses. The findings support theoretical perspectives on social relationships and motivation as well as the efficacy of a person-centered approach to the examination of peer relationships in sport.

Testosterone administration in human participants increased amygdala responses during threat approach and decreased it during threat avoidance., Testosterone enhances amygdala reactions to social threat, but it remains unclear whether this neuroendocrine mechanism is relevant for understanding its dominance-enhancing properties; namely, whether testosterone biases the human amygdala toward threat approach. This pharmacological functional magnetic-resonance imaging study shows that testosterone administration increases amygdala responses in healthy women during threat approach and decreases it during threat avoidance. These findings support and extend motivational salience models by offering a neuroendocrine mechanism of motivation-specific amygdala tuning.

Avila and Lin report that the speed and variability of the decision-making process are tightly coupled and jointly determined by the motivational salience signal in the basal forebrain., The survival of animals depends critically on prioritizing responses to motivationally salient stimuli. While it is generally believed that motivational salience increases decision speed, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and decision speed, measured by reaction time (RT), remains unclear. Here we show that the neural correlate of motivational salience in the basal forebrain (BF), defined independently of RT, is coupled with faster and also more precise decision speed. In rats performing a reward-biased simple RT task, motivational salience was encoded by BF bursting response that occurred before RT. We found that faster RTs were tightly coupled with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Furthermore, the fraction of RT variability reflecting the contribution of intrinsic noise in the decision-making process was actively suppressed in faster RT distributions with stronger BF motivational salience signals. Artificially augmenting the BF motivational salience signal via electrical stimulation led to faster and more precise RTs and supports a causal relationship. Together, these results not only describe for the first time, to our knowledge, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and faster decision speed, they also reveal the quantitative coupling relationship between motivational salience and more precise RT. Our results further establish the existence of an early and previously unrecognized step in the decision-making process that determines both the RT speed and variability of the entire decision-making process and suggest that this novel decision step is dictated largely by the BF motivational salience signal. Finally, our study raises the hypothesis that the dysregulation of decision speed in conditions such as depression, schizophrenia, and cognitive aging may result from the functional impairment of the motivational salience signal encoded by the poorly understood noncholinergic BF neurons., Author Summary Humans and animals face the constant challenge of identifying the subset of incoming sensory stimuli that are most behaviorally relevant and prioritizing behavioral responses accordingly. Critical to this decision is the ability to determine whether a stimulus is motivationally salient—that is, whether the stimulus predicts important behavioral outcomes such as reward or punishment. While it is generally assumed that motivational salience is related to faster decision speed and shorter reaction time, it remains unclear how motivational salience actually modulates the decision-making process. This study investigates how the motivational salience signal in the basal forebrain controls the fundamental properties of the decision-making process—decision speed and its variability. In rats performing a reward-biased simple reaction time task, we show that the basal forebrain motivational salience signal is associated with a faster and also precise decision speed. In support of a causal role for this association, artificially augmenting this basal forebrain motivational salience signal by electrical stimulation also leads to faster and more precise reaction times. These results suggest that decision speed and its variability are jointly determined by an early and previously unrecognized step in the decision-making process, dictated largely by the motivational salience signal encoded by poorly understood noncholinergic neurons in the basal forebrain.

Risky sexual behaviors typically occur when a person is sexually motivated by potent, sexual reward cues. Yet, individual differences in sensitivit yt o sexual cues have not been examined with respect to sexual risk behaviors. A greater responsiveness to sexual cues might provide greater motivation for 10 a person to act sexually; a lower responsiveness to sexual cues might lead a person to seek more intense, novel, possibly risky, sexual acts. In this study, event-related potentials were recorded in 64 men and women while they viewed a series of emotional, including explicit sexual, photographs. The motivational salience of the sexual cues was varied by including more and less explicit sexual images. Indeed, the more explicit sexual stimuli resulted in enhanced late positive potentials (LPP) relative to the less explicit sexual images. Participants with fewer sexual intercourse partners in the last year had reduced LPP amplitude to the less explicit sexual images than the more explicit sexual images, whereas participants with more partners responded 15 similarly to the more and less explicit sexual images. This pattern of results is consistent with a greater responsivity model. Those who engage in more sexual behaviors consistent with risk are also more responsive to less explicit sexual cues.

The Serotonin 5-HT 2C Receptor in Medial Prefrontal Cortex Exerts Rheostatic Control over the Motivational Salience of Cocaine-Associated Cues: New Observations from Preclinical Animal Research

The gonadal hormone estradiol modulates mesolimbic dopamine systems in the female rat. This modulatory effect is thought to be responsible for the observed effects of estradiol on motivated behaviors. Dopamine acting in the nucleus accumbens is thought to be important for the attribution of incentive motivational properties to cues that predict reward delivery, while dopamine in the striatum is associated with the expression of repetitive or stereotyped behaviors. Elevated concentrations of estradiol are associated with increased motivation for sex or cues associated with access to a mate, while simultaneously attenuating motivation for food. This shift in motivational salience is important for adaptive choice behavior in the natural environment. Additionally, estradiol's adaptive effects on motivation can be maladaptive when increasing motivation for non-natural reinforcers, such as drugs of abuse. Here we discuss the effect of estradiol on mesotelencephalic dopamine transmission and subsequent effects on motivated behaviors.

The attribution of incentive salience to reward associated cues is critical for motivation and the pursuit of rewards. Disruptions in the integrity of the neural systems controlling these processes can lead to avolition and anhedonia, symptoms that cross the diagnostic boundaries of many neuropsychiatric illnesses. Here, we consider whether the habenula (Hb), a region recently demonstrated to encode negatively valenced events, also modulates the attribution of incentive salience to a neutral cue predicting a food reward. The Pavlovian autoshaping paradigm was used in the rat as an investigative tool to dissociate Pavlovian learning processes imparting strictly predictive value from learning that attributes incentive motivational value. Electrolytic lesions of the fasciculus retroflexus (fr), the sole pathway through which descending Hb efferents are conveyed, significantly increased incentive salience as measured by conditioned approaches to a cue light predictive of reward. Conversely, generation of a fictive Hb signal via fr stimulation during CS+ presentation significantly decreased the incentive salience of the predictive cue. Neither manipulation altered the reward predictive value of the cue as measured by conditioned approach to the food. Our results provide new evidence supporting a significant role for the Hb in governing the attribution of incentive motivational salience to reward predictive cues and further imply that pathological changes in Hb activity could contribute to the aberrant pursuit of debilitating goals or avolition and depression-like symptoms.

Prior research links greater activation of posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC) and anterior insula (AI) with decreasing outcome predictability during decision making, as measured by decreasing probability for the more likely outcome out of two or increasing outcome variance. In addition to predictability, much work indicates that the magnitude or ‘stakes’ of the outcome is also important. Despite the interest in the neural correlates of these decision variables, it is unknown whether pMFC and AI are differentially sensitive to predictability when magnitude is varied. This study examined brain activity during decision making in relation to decreasing outcome predictability for low as compared with high magnitude decisions. For low magnitude decisions, reduced predictability of the outcome was associated with greater activity in pMFC and bilateral AI, replicating prior studies. In contrast, there was no relationship between predictability and brain activity for high magnitude decisions, which tended to elicit greater pMFC and AI activity than low magnitude decisions for more predictable outcomes. These data indicate that the relationship between outcome predictability and pMFC and AI activity during decision making depends on magnitude, and suggest that these regions may be responding to the motivational salience of the decision rather than predictability information per se.

In this paper the concept of incentive motivational salience is briefly described, pioneering studies on the subject of the mesolimbic motivational system are reviewed, and studies we have been involved in conducting which elaborate on this subject are discussed. In particular, we aim to show that the mesolimbic motivational system is recruited as a reaction to primary and secondary reinforcers as a function of salience, that is independent of valence. Furthermore, studies showing that both psychological and pharmacological interventions can affect the function of the mesolimbic motivational system and how its' dysfunction is related to psychopathological phenomena with an emphasis on psychosis are discussed.

Salience, Values, and Decisions How does the brain make value-based decisions? There are two major competing models: the goodsbased model and the action-based model of value. Leathers and Olson (p. 132 ) designed a critical experiment to decide between these two views. In the monkey brain, lateral intraparietal neurons responded strongly to stimuli predicting both large rewards and large penalties, encoding the salience of the stimulus rather than reward value, which refutes both models.

BACKGROUND: Bradykinesia is a cardinal feature of Parkinson's disease (PD). Despite its disabling impact, the precise cause of this symptom remains elusive. Recent thinking suggests that bradykinesia may be more than simply a manifestation of motor slowness, and may in part reflect a specific deficit in the operation of motivational vigour in the striatum. In this paper we test the hypothesis that movement time in PD can be modulated by the specific nature of the motivational salience of possible action-outcomes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We developed a novel movement time paradigm involving winnable rewards and avoidable painful electrical stimuli. The faster the subjects performed an action the more likely they were to win money (in appetitive blocks) or to avoid a painful shock (in aversive blocks). We compared PD patients when OFF dopaminergic medication with controls. Our key finding is that PD patients OFF dopaminergic medication move faster to avoid aversive outcomes (painful electric shocks) than to reap rewarding outcomes (winning money) and, unlike controls, do not speed up in the current trial having failed to win money in the previous one. We also demonstrate that sensitivity to distracting stimuli is valence specific. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We suggest this pattern of results can be explained in terms of low dopamine levels in the Parkinsonian state leading to an insensitivity to appetitive outcomes, and thus an inability to modulate movement speed in the face of rewards. By comparison, sensitivity to aversive stimuli is relatively spared. Our findings point to a rarely described property of bradykinesia in PD, namely its selective regulation by everyday outcomes.

Recent studies have shown that motivational stimulus information is represented in the brain even in situations where the individual is not actively engaged in stimulus evaluation. However, it has remained unclear whether neural representations of such implicit motivational information reflect the motivational value or motivational salience of stimuli. While motivational values correspond to the desirability of stimuli, motivational salience is related to the arousal elicited by the stimulus. Here we aimed at disentangling the neural representation of both motivational dimensions. In the first part, participants learned the association of face stimuli with monetary reward and punishment. The same face stimuli were presented in a subsequent fMRI experiment, during which participants either performed a gender discrimination task on the faces or an orientation discrimination task on two simultaneously presented bars. Importantly, faces only differed regarding their implicit motivational information as acquired in the previous learning task, as participants neither received monetary reinforcement during the fMRI experiment nor were they asked to explicitly judge their face preferences. We found that neural responses in lateral OFC were modulated by implicit motivational value, whereas the faces' implicit motivational salience was coded in medial OFC. While the value-related responses in lateral OFC decreased over time, the salience-related modulation of medial OFC activity remained stable over the duration of the fMRI experiment. Neural responses to both motivational dimensions were observed independent of whether participants' attention was directed to the faces or to the surrounding bars, suggesting an automatic processing of implicit motivational value and salience. The functional dissociation within the OFC suggests that this region is critically involved in distinct motivation-related processes: In medial OFC, a representation of salient items may be maintained in order to facilitate responses towards behaviourally relevant stimuli in the future; in contrast the temporary value effect in lateral OFC might reflect decreasing stimulus valuation in the absence of explicit motivational stimulus differences.

Based on a basic emotions perspective, a dominant view in psychology is that the primary function of the amygdala is to govern the emotion of fear. In this view, the amygdala is necessary for a person to feel afraid, and when amygdala activity is detected, one can infer that a person is feeling afraid or threatened. In this paper, we review current research on amygdala function that calls into question this threat-specific view and propose a more general view of amygdala functioning based on appraisal theory and psychological constructivism. Specifically, we examine the hypothesis that the amygdala is involved in processing stimulus relevance for the goals and motivations of the perceiver. Thus, although threatening stimuli are almost always considered a relevant stimulus, novel, ambiguous, and extremely positive stimuli can also be relevant for different people in different situations. Once deemed relevant, the amygdala guides processing to orchestrate an appropriate response.

O investimento na aparência é um factor importante na explicação das diferenças individuais na adaptação às alterações corporais associadas ao cancro da mama. Esta variável refere-se à importância atribuída pelo indivíduo à sua aparência física e engloba as facetas saliência auto-avaliativa (SAV; grau em que o indivíduo considera que a sua aparência integra a sua identidade e permite aferir o seu valor pessoal) e saliência motivacional (SM; grau em que o indivíduo está atento ou valoriza a gestão da aparência, de forma a acentuar a sua atractividade física). Este estudo pretende analisar o papel destas duas facetas na adaptação às fases de diagnóstico e sobrevivência da doença. A amostra engloba 82 mulheres recentemente diagnosticadas com cancro da mama e 86 sobreviventes. Verificou-se a ausência de diferenças significativas entre os grupos nas duas facetas do investimento. Simultanea mente, constatou-se que ambas as facetas contribuíram para a explicação de diversos indicadores de adaptação, particularmente no grupo de sobreviventes, estando a SM associada a resultados mais adaptativos e a SAV a resultados mais disfuncionais. Este trabalho demonstra que a compreensão do valor que a mulher atribui à sua aparência é extremamente importante para a sua adaptação, em ambas as fases do cancro da mama. Appearance investment is an important factor for the explanation of individual differences in the adjustment to breast cancer-related appearance changes. It concerns the importance an individual places on their appearance and encompasses the self-evaluative salience facet (SES; the importance an individual places on physical appearance for their definition of self-worth) and motivational salience facet (MS; the individual’s efforts to be or feel attractive). This study aims to analyse its role on the adjustment to the diagnosis and survival phases of the disease. The sample encompasses 82 newly-diagnosed breast cancer patients and 86 breast cancer survivors. No differences were observed between groups on both facets of investment. Additionally, both facets contributed to the explanation of several adjustment indicators, particularly among survivors, with SM being associated with more adaptive indicators and SES with more dysfunctional outcomes. This study demonstrates that understanding the value that women attributes to their appearance is extremely important for their adjustment, in both phases of breast cancer.

We compared the ability of positive and negative emotional arousal to increase the duration of consolidated memory traces. Positive arousal was modulated by manipulating the motivational salience of the testing cage of an object recognition test (ORT). Negative emotional arousal was modulated by manipulating shock levels in a step-through inhibitory avoidance (IA). Mice trained in either a high (chocolate-associated) or a low (inedible object-associated) emotionally arousing cage showed discrimination of a novel object 24 hours after training, but only mice trained in the more arousing cage showed retention 96 hours after training. Mice trained with either low (0.35 mA) or high (0.7 mA) shock intensities showed increased step-through latencies when tested 24 hours after training, but only mice trained with the higher shock intensity showed retention of the inhibitory avoidance learning 1 week after training. Administration of the phosphodiesterase type IV inhibitor Rolipram immediately after training in the two low arousing conditions increases duration of both responses.

This study investigated the relationship between feedback processing and antisocial personality traits measured by the PSSI questionnaire (Kuhl & Kazén, 1997) in a healthy undergraduate sample. While event-related potentials (Feedback Related Negativity [FRN], P300) were recorded, participants encountered expected and unexpected feedback during a gambling task. As recent findings suggest learning problems and deficiencies during feedback processing in clinical populations of antisocial individuals, we performed two experiments with different healthy participants in which feedback about monetary gains or losses consisted either of social-emotional (facial emotion displays) or non-social cues (numerical stimuli). Since the FRN and P300 are both sensitive to different aspects of feedback processing we hypothesized that they might help to differentiate between individuals scoring high and low on an antisocial trait measure.In line with previous evidence FRN amplitudes were enhanced after negative and after unexpected feedback stimuli. Crucially, participants scoring high on antisocial traits displayed larger FRN amplitudes than those scoring low only in response to expected and unexpected negative numerical feedback, but not in response to social-emotional feedback - irrespective of expectancy. P300 amplitudes were not modulated by antisocial traits at all, but by subjective reward probabilities. The present findings indicate that individuals scoring high on antisociality attribute higher motivational salience to monetary compared to emotional-social feedback which is reflected in FRN amplitude enhancement. Contrary to recent findings, however, no processing deficiencies concerning social-emotional feedback stimuli were apparent in those individuals. This indicates that stimulus salience is an important aspect in learning and feedback processes in individuals with antisocial traits which has potential implications for therapeutic interventions in clinical populations.

Suppression of conditioned avoidance response is a preclinical behavioral index of antipsychotic activity. Previous work shows that olanzapine and risperidone disrupt avoidance response elicited by a less salient conditioned stimulus (CS2) to a greater extent than avoidance elicited by a more salient stimulus (CS1), suggesting that antipsychotic drugs may have a weakening action on motivational salience of stimuli. In the present study, we further examined this mechanism of antipsychotic action, focusing on the possible impact of baseline difference of CS1 and CS2 response rates on the avoidance-disruptive effect of olanzapine and risperidone. Rats were first trained to acquire avoidance responding in a procedure in which the number of CS2 trials (i.e. 20) was twice the number of CS1 trials (i.e. 10), but the percentage of CS2-shock pairing was set at 25% lower (15 trials out of 20) than the percentage of CS1-shock pairing (20 trials out of 20). They were then tested daily under olanzapine (0.5 and 1.0 mg/kg, sc) or risperidone (0.33 and 1.0 mg/kg, sc) for 5 consecutive days. Repeated olanzapine and risperidone treatment dose-dependently disrupted avoidance responding to both CS1 and CS2. Both drugs at the high dose disrupted the CS2 avoidance to a greater extent than the CS1 avoidance. In the final challenge test, rats previously treated with olanzapine were tested under risperidone (0.33 mg/kg), whereas rats previously treated with risperidone were tested under olanzapine (0.5 mg/kg). Results show that rats previously treated with risperidone 1.0 mg/kg group made significantly fewer avoidance responses than the vehicles under olanzapine at 0.5 mg/kg. These findings confirm that olanzapine and risperidone disrupt avoidance response primarily by selectively attenuating the motivational salience of the CS. The present study also suggests that there is a generality of antipsychotic drug experience that is mediated by a shared interoceptive drug state mechanism.

Recent research and theory has highlighted the dynamic nature of amygdala activation. Rather than simply being sensitive to a few limited stimulus categories, amygdala activation appears to be dependent on the goals of the perceiver. In this study, we extend this line of work by demonstrating that the means by which a person seeks to accomplish a goal also modulates the amygdala response. Specifically, we examine the modulatory effects of the aspects of neuroticism (volatility/withdrawal), a personality variable that has been linked to both generalized anxiety and differences in amygdala sensitivity. Whereas Neuroticism-Volatility is proposed to be associated with the fight-flight-freeze system (FFFS) and a sensitivity for any cues of negativity, Neuroticism-Withdrawal is proposed to be associated with the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and a generalized tendency toward passive avoidance. During fMRI scanning, participants were presented with positive, negative, and neutral images and were required to approach (move perceptually closer) or avoid (move perceptually farther away) stimuli in different blocks of trials. Consistent with hypotheses proposing a dissociation between these two aspects of neuroticism, participants higher in Neuroticism-Volatility had increased amygdala activation to negative stimuli (regardless of whether they were approached or avoided), whereas participants higher in Neuroticism-Withdrawal had increased amygdala activation to all approached stimuli (regardless of stimulus valence). These data provide further support for the motivational salience hypothesis of amygdala function, and demonstrate that both the ends and means of goal pursuit are important for shaping a response.

Exaggerated reactivity to food cues in obese women appears to be mediated in part by a hyperactive reward system that includes the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether differences between 12 obese and 12 normal-weight women in reward-related brain activation in response to food images can be explained by changes in the functional interactions between key reward network regions. A two-step path analysis/General Linear Model approach was used to test whether there were group differences in network connections between nucleus accumbens, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex in response to high- and low-calorie food images. There was abnormal connectivity in the obese group in response to both high- and low-calorie food cues compared to normal-weight controls. Compared to controls, the obese group had a relative deficiency in the amygdala's modulation of activation in both orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens, but excessive influence of orbitofrontal cortex's modulation of activation in nucleus accumbens. The deficient projections from the amygdala might relate to suboptimal modulation of the affective/emotional aspects of a food's reward value or an associated cue's motivational salience, whereas increased orbitofrontal cortex to nucleus accumbens connectivity might contribute to a heightened drive to eat in response to a food cue. Thus, it is possible that not only greater activation of the reward system, but also differences in the interaction of regions in this network may contribute to the relatively increased motivational value of foods in obese individuals.

Both reward- and punishment-related stimuli are motivationally salient and attract the attention of animals. However, it remains unclear how motivational salience is processed in the brain. Here we show that both reward- and punishment-predicting stimuli elicited robust bursting of many non-cholinergic basal forebrain (BF) neurons in behaving rats. The same BF neurons also responded with similar bursting to primary reinforcement of both valences. Reinforcement responses were modulated by expectation, with surprising reinforcement eliciting stronger BF bursting. We further demonstrate that BF burst firing predicted successful detection of near-threshold stimuli. Together, our results point to the existence of a salience-encoding system independent of stimulus valence. We propose that the encoding of motivational salience by ensemble bursting of non-cholinergic BF neurons may improve behavioral performance by affecting the activity of widespread cortical circuits, and therefore represents a novel candidate mechanism for top-down attention.

Research indicates that drug-related cues elicit attention and approach biases in drug users. However, attentional biases are not unique to addiction (e.g., they are also found for emotional information). This study examined whether attentional and approach biases in cigarette smokers are mediated by the motivational salience of cues (relevance to drug-taking), rather than by their affective properties (subjective liking of the cues). Cues included pleasant and unpleasant smoking-related pictures. Attentional biases, approach tendencies and subjective evaluation of the cues were assessed on visual probe, stimulus—response compatibility and rating tasks, respectively. Compared with non-smokers, smokers showed a greater attentional bias for both pleasant and unpleasant smoking-related cues presented for 2000 ms, but not for 200 ms. Smokers showed a greater approach bias for unpleasant cues, although the groups did not differ significantly in approach bias for pleasant smoking-related cues. Smokers rated both pleasant and unpleasant smoking pictures more positively than did non-smokers. Results suggest that a bias to maintain attention on smoking-related cues in young adult smokers is primarily a function of drug-relevance, rather than affective properties, of the cues. In contrast, approach tendencies and pleasantness judgements were influenced by drug use, drug-relevance and the affective properties of the cues.

Although hairlessness is rapidly becoming a component of the ideal male body, little research has examined men's concerns about their body hair or their hair removal practices. Samples of gay and heterosexual men completed questionnaires that assessed whether they had ever removed their back, buttock or pubic hair, the frequency with which they did so, the methods used and their self-reported reasons for removing this hair, as well as their level of appearance investment. Results indicated that many gay and heterosexual men remove their back, buttock and pubic hair regularly and that their primary reason for doing so is to maintain or improve their appearance. The frequency of hair removal was also associated with the motivational salience component of appearance investment. The findings offer further support to the premise that gay and heterosexual men exhibit similar body image concerns.

This study investigated the effect of thin images according to two dimensions of body-image (BI) investment. Ninety-five females were classified as high or low investors based on the Appearance Schemas Inventory-Revised Self-Evaluative Salience (SES) and Motivational Salience (MS) subscales. Participants viewed advertisements portraying either the thin ideal or products. Results indicated that both women high in SES and MS reported lowered appearance self-esteem but greater BI importance following thin exposures. However, only the high SES group reported greater BI dissatisfaction and importance of current-ideal discrepancies after seeing thin images. Although highly invested women (regardless of their motivation for investment) are more responsive to thin media images than are women low in investment, those invested for self-definition are affected on more dimensions than are those invested for appearance management.

This study systematically manipulated both picture content and noise probe time in order to evaluate the effects of motivational salience (as distinguished from affective valence) on both early and late modulation of the startle response. Specifically, modulation was compared for erotic versus action/adventure scenes, and for direct threat versus victim scenes, at early (300 and 800 ms) and late (3500 ms) probe times — all relative to neutral. Blink inhibition was observed at all probe times during presentation of erotic pictures, and blink potentiation was evident at all times during presentation of direct threat pictures. Patterns of blink modulation were less consistent for action and victim picture contents. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that under conditions of high motivational salience, affective startle modulation indexes the activation of appetitive-approach and defensive motivational states, even at early stages of picture processing.

The catecholamines dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline, NA) exert a strong modulatory control over the “motive circuit”. This neuronal circuit comprises cortical, striatal and thalamic areas and underlies the behavioural expression of motivated behaviour, including classical and operant conditioning. Conditioned and unconditioned stimuli with a strong motivational salience have rapid access to the catecholaminergic systems and activation by such stimuli may result in the modulation of a wide array of neuronal processes in the brain. Microdialysis is the universally applicable method to determine the transmitter efflux resulting from this activation. In this chapter, the evidence that DA and NA efflux is increased by conditioned approach and avoidance behaviour and during instrumental actions is reviewed and data obtained using microdialysis are compared with results from in vivo electrophysiological and electrochemical studies. Special attention is paid to the suggestions that the catecholamines support flexibility in operant responding and may have a unique role in reward-related learning.

Hemispatial neglect is usually designated a “parietal syndrome.” However, neglect can also arise after lesions in the frontal lobes, cingulate gyrus, striatum, and thalamus. These areas belong to an interconnected large-scale network subserving all aspects of spatial attention. This network helps to compile a mental representation of extrapersonal events in terms of their motivational salience, and to generate “kinetic strategies” so that the attentional focus can shift from one target to another. In the human, the left hemisphere controls attention predominantly within the contralateral right hemispace, whereas the right hemisphere controls attention in both hemispaces. As a consequence of this asymmetry, severe contralesional neglect occurs almost exclusively after right hemisphere lesions and encompasses the left side of extrapersonal space.

Objective Attention biases toward food-related stimuli were examined as mediators of normal, healthy motivated behavior. Methods Reaction times (RTs) and event-related potentials (ERPs) were used to assess the impact of food-related words on normal food-deprived individuals when used as spatial cues that frequently predicted the location of targets in a simple detection task (75% validity). Results In Experiment 1, fasting and nonfasting subjects showed a magnified cost/benefit of invalid/valid cueing by food words relative to a neutral category of words. In Experiment 2, the RT effect was replicated in a group of fasting subjects. The amplitude of a P3-like positivity (P420) was enhanced in response to food words, as was that of a prominent early anterior negativity (AN). Conclusions These findings demonstrate that food-related stimuli can bias spatial attention in normal subjects and that electrophysiological markers can index the motivational salience of food words and/or their effect on attentional capture in food-deprived individuals. Significance Even when the motivational salience of spatial cues is irrelevant to task demands, it can have an observable effect on attention. This design allows for the behavioral and electrophysiological study of motivation–attention interactions through loading of spatial cues with motivation-related semantic properties.

The relationship between dopamine, psychosis and antipsychotics has been challenged by the suggestion that there is a delay, of weeks, between the onset of dopamine receptor blockade and improvement in psychosis. However, recent data show that there is no significant delay. In light of these new findings, it is proposed that dopamine, through its role in reward prediction and motivational salience, provides a link to psychosis. Psychosis results from aberrant reward prediction and aberrant attribution of salience that is caused by disordered dopamine transmission. Antipsychotics become anti-"psychotic" by blocking dopamine transmission and attenuating the motivational salience of the symptoms, leading to the common statement from patients that symptoms "don't bother me as much anymore". This attenuation of salience also impacts on normal motivational drives, providing an explanation for why antipsychotics might induce iatrogenic negative symptoms and dysphoria, often leading to non-compliance by patients. The implications of this framework for relapse and other clinical phenomena, animal models and future studies are discussed.

A comprehensive review of women’s dietary behavior across the menstrual cycle suggests a drop in caloric intake around the time of ovulation; similar patterns occur in many other mammals. The periovulatory nadir is puzzling, as it is not explicable in terms of changes in the energy budget. Existing explanations in the animal literature operate wholly at the proximate level of analysis and hence do not address this puzzle. In this paper, I offer an ultimate explanation for the periovulatory feeding nadir, arguing that the decrease in the set point for satiation during the fertile period of the female cycle is an adaptation produced by natural selection in order to reduce the motivational salience of goals that compete with those directly or indirectly pertaining to mating. In support of this explanation, I adduce evidence of: a) periovulatory reductions in other ingestive behaviors, and b) periovulatory increases in motor activity and the psychological concomitants thereof.

Infant facial features are thought to be powerful elicitors of caregiving behaviour. It has been widely assumed that men and women respond in different ways to these features, such as a large forehead and eyes and round protrouding cheeks, colloquially described as 'cute'. We investigated experimentally potential differences using measures of both conscious appraisal ('liking') and behavioural responsivity ('wanting') to real world infant and adult faces in 71 non-parents. Overall, women gave significantly higher 'liking' ratings for infant faces (but not adult faces) compared to men. However, this difference was not seen in the 'wanting' task, where we measured the willingness of men and women to key-press to increase or decrease viewing duration of an infant face. Further analysis of sensitivity to cuteness, categorising infants by degree of infantile features, revealed that both men and women showed a graded significant increase in both positive attractiveness ratings and viewing times to the 'cutest' infants. We suggest that infant faces may have a similar motivational salience to men and women, despite gender idiosyncrasies in their conscious appraisal.

Intense motivational salience attribution is considered to have a major role in the development of different psychopathologies. Numerous brain areas are involved in "normal" motivational salience attribution processes; however, it is not clear whether common or different neural mechanisms also underlie intense motivational salience attribution. To elucidate this a brain area and a neural system had to be envisaged that were involved only in motivational salience attribution to highly salient stimuli. Using intracerebral microdialysis, we found that natural stimuli induced an increase in norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex of mice proportional to their salience, and that selective prefrontal norepinephrine depletion abolished the increase of norepinephrine release in the medial prefrontal cortex induced by exposure to appetitive (palatable food) or aversive (light) stimuli independently of salience. However, selective norepinephrine depletion in the medial prefrontal cortex impaired the place conditioning induced exclusively by highly salient stimuli, thus indicating that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines approach or avoidance responses to both reward- and aversion-related natural stimuli only when the salience of the unconditioned natural stimulus is high enough to induce sustained norepinephrine outflow. This affirms that prefrontal noradrenergic transmission determines motivational salience attribution selectively when intense motivational salience is processed, as in conditions that characterize psychopathological outcomes.