Department of Psychology, City, University of London, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, UK.
Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy, Rome, Italy.
Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. 2023 Aug;23(4):973-985. doi: 10.3758/s13415-023-01086-4. Epub 2023 Apr 4.
Referent-dependent evaluation theories propose that the ongoing context influences how the brain attributes value to stimuli. What are the implications of these theories for understanding addiction? The paper asks this question by casting this disorder as a form of maladaptive referent-dependent evaluation. Specifically, addiction is proposed to arise from the establishment of an excessive reference point following repeated drug consumption. Several key aspects of the disorder emerge from this perspective, including withdrawal, tolerance, enhanced craving, negative mood, and diminished stimulus discriminability. As highlighted in the paper, this formulation has important analogies with classical accounts of addiction, such as set point theories and associative learning theories. Moreover, this picture fits with the pattern of striatal dopaminergic activity observed in addiction, a key neural signature of the disorder. Overall, the referent-dependent evaluation approach emerges as a useful add-on to the theoretical toolkit adopted to interpret addiction. This also supports the idea that referent-dependent evaluation might offer a general framework to understand various disorders characterised by disrupted motivation.
参照依赖评估理论提出,持续的语境会影响大脑对刺激赋予价值的方式。这些理论对理解成瘾有什么影响?本文通过将这种障碍视为一种适应不良的参照依赖评估形式来提出这个问题。具体来说,成瘾被认为是由于反复吸毒后建立了一个过高的参照点而产生的。从这个角度来看,该障碍的几个关键方面显现出来,包括戒断、耐受、增强的渴望、负面情绪和刺激辨别力下降。正如本文所强调的,这种表述与成瘾的经典解释,如设定点理论和联想学习理论,有重要的相似之处。此外,这种情况与成瘾中观察到的纹状体多巴胺能活动模式相吻合,这是该障碍的一个关键神经特征。总的来说,参照依赖评估方法作为一种有用的补充,被纳入到用于解释成瘾的理论工具包中。这也支持了参照依赖评估可能提供一个理解各种以动机障碍为特征的障碍的通用框架的观点。