The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the pursuit of happiness and more specific rewards

Kathryn A. Burke, Theresa M. Franz, Danielle N. Miller and Geoffrey Schoenbaum ()
Additional contact information
Kathryn A. Burke: Program in Neuroscience,
Theresa M. Franz: Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology,
Danielle N. Miller: The Ingenuity Project, Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, 1400 West Coldspring Lane, Baltimore, Maryland 21209, USA
Geoffrey Schoenbaum: Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology,

Nature, 2008, vol. 454, issue 7202, 340-344

Abstract: In pursuit of happiness: Striking a balance in the brain A cue that's reliably associated with a reward will prompt humans and other animals to think the thoughts normally evoked by the reward. These 'conditioned reinforcers' can vary from a familiar corporate logo to drug-associated cues. How they work is still unclear. Burke et al. studied conditioned reinforcement in rats in an experiment that differentiated between cues evoking thoughts of specific outcomes and cues that evoked general stimulus–emotion representations. They report that rats would work for either form of cue, and that the orbitofrontal cortex, part of the brain important in adaptive decision making, was important for conditioned reinforcement involving cues that evoked thoughts of specific outcomes, but not for those evoking happiness in a more general sense. An imbalance between the response to these two cue types is characteristic of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as drug addiction and eating disorders, where the response to a cue may be in direct contradiction to the desirability of the outcome. This work suggests that it may be possible to overcome this imbalance therapeutically.

Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06993 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:454:y:2008:i:7202:d:10.1038_nature06993

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature06993

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().