Chunk #24 — 1 Definitions and Conceptual Framework for Reward Deficit in Alcoholism — 1.1 Theoretical Framework: Motivation, Withdrawal, and Opponent Process
The emotional dysregulation associated with the withdrawal/negative affect stage may also involve between-system neuroadaptations in which neurochemical systems other than those involved in the positive rewarding effects of drugs of abuse are recruited or dysregulated by chronic activation of the reward system. “In the between-systems opposing process, a different cellular system and separable molecular apparatus would be triggered by the changes in the primary drug response neurons and would produce the adaptation and tolerance” (Koob and Bloom 1988). Thus, a between-system neuroadaptation is a circuitry change in which another different circuit (anti-reward circuit) is activated by the reward circuit and has opposing actions, again limiting reward function. The remainder of this review explores the neuroadaptational changes that occur in the brain emotional systems to account for the neurocircuitry changes that produce opponent processes and are hypothesized to play a key role in the compulsivity of addiction.
