Serotonin and dopamine differentially affect appetitive and aversive general Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer

Abstract

These results demonstrate a differential involvement of serotonin and dopamine in motivated behavior. They suggest that reductions in serotonin enhance the motivational influence of aversive stimuli on instrumental behavior and do not affect the influence of appetitive stimuli, while reductions in dopamine diminish the influence of appetitive stimuli. No conclusions could be drawn about how dopamine affects the influence of aversive stimuli. The interplay of both neurotransmitter systems allows for flexible and adaptive responses depending on the behavioral context.

The dopaminergic reward system underpins gender differences in social preferences

“…Some evidence in humans suggests that the dopamine and serotonin systems play opposing or at least complementary roles 23,24,[42][43][44] . In this view, the serotonin system primarily underpins punishment processing whereas the dopamine system primarily underpins reward processing.…”

Catecholaminergic challenge uncovers distinct Pavlovian and instrumental mechanisms of motivated (in)action

“…appetitive cues promote active responding (appetitive PIT), whereas aversive cues increase behavioural inhibition (aversive PIT; Davis and Wright, 1979; Huys et al, 2011). Enhanced dopamine increases appetitive PIT (Wyvell and Berridge, 2000), while appetitive PIT is lowered when striatal dopamine is reduced (Dickinson et al, 2000; Hebart and Gläscher, 2015; Lex and Hauber, 2008). Striatal dopamine has also been linked to controlling aversively motivated behaviour (Faure et al, 2008; Lloyd and Dayan, 2016).…”

Interaction of Instrumental and Goal-Directed Learning Modulates Prediction Error Representations in the Ventral Striatum

“…This finding is consistent with a contribution of the amygdala in representing motivational control of instrumental responses (Baxter and Murray, 2002; Balleine and Killcross, 2006). Previous studies mainly demonstrated amygdala's involvement in mediating between S-O and R-O associations by using the Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer paradigm (Huys et al, 2011;Prévost et al, 2012;Hebart and Gläscher, 2015), where the two associations are learned separately and their interaction is examined afterward during extinction. However, our subjects had no prior training for associating the stimulus to primary reward.…”

“…However, there are two sources of uncertainty in our task: one associated with the stimulus likelihood and the other associated with the reward probabilities. Both human and animal studies have demonstrated the amygdala's engagement in learning environmental contingencies (Hsu et al, 2005;Herry et al, 2007;Madarasz et al, 2016), showing greater activation of the amygdala in response to stimuli associated with greater degrees of uncertainty or unpredictability. Thus, the greater amygdala response in the biased condition of our task may reflect a greater amount of reward uncertainty due to the conflict between stimulus and reward likelihood.…”