facilitation seen in rats during adolescence (Varlinskaya & Spear, 2010). It is also possible that some adolescent-typical sensitivities to alcohol may reflect broad developmental alterations in DA projection systems and their neural targets in the nucleus accumbens, PFC, and amygdala that affect the processing of multiple types of rewards (see Doremus-Fitzwater et al., 2010, for review). Indeed, the adolescent alcohol data are reminiscent of other findings showing adolescent-typical patterns of sensitivities to appetitive (positively rewarding) and aversive properties of natural rewards and drugs other than alcohol.
