Association for Behavior Analysis International

Behavior analyses reveal surprising psychological features and neurobiological mechanisms underlying intense motivations of reward-related liking and wanting, and relations to negative-valence motivations of fear and disgust. Clinical disorders of addiction, binge eating, depression and schizophrenia often involve intense psychopathological mood or motivation states. So it is of interest to understand how limbic brain circuits (involving nucleus accumbens) generate intense motivational states of reward wanting and liking, and also of fearful or aversive states. Behavioral analyses and affective neuroscience studies indicate that wanting a reward is generated by a different brain mechanism from liking the same reward. The difference between wanting versus liking has implications for understanding addiction and related disorders. Yet surprisingly, desire and fear can both can both be generated by an overlapping mechanism, which may have different modes for each. This lecture will address such dissociations and convergence in affective brain mechanisms

Review Kent Berridge’s biographical statement.