2015/06/15 by Daniel C. Castro, Shannon L. Cole, Kent Berridge · 1 citation
Neuroscience · Nursing · Psychology · Medicine · #Sleep and Wakefulness Research #Regulation of Appetite and Obesity #Biochemical Analysis and Sensing Techniques #Nucleus accumbens #Incentive salience #Dopamine #Ventral pallidum #Neuroscience #Psychology #Lateral hypothalamus #Reward system #Brain stimulation reward #Orexin #Hypothalamus #Salience (neuroscience) #Ventral striatum #Basal ganglia #Striatum #Medicine #Internal medicine #Neuropeptide #Central nervous system
paper · pdf · doi:10.3389/fnsys.2015.00090
openalex publication_date 2015/06/15 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02
The study of the neural bases of eating behavior, hunger, and reward has consistently implicated the lateral hypothalamus (LH) and its interactions with mesocorticolimbic circuitry, such as mesolimbic dopamine projections to nucleus accumbens (NAc) and ventral pallidum (VP), in controlling motivation to eat. The NAc and VP play special roles in mediating the hedonic impact ("liking") and motivational incentive salience ("wanting") of food rewards, and their interactions with LH help permit regulatory hunger/satiety modulation of food motivation and reward. Here, we review some progress that has been made regarding this circuitry and its functions: the identification of localized anatomical hedonic hotspots within NAc and VP for enhancing hedonic impact; interactions of NAc/VP hedonic hotspots with specific LH signals such as orexin; an anterior-posterior gradient of sites in NAc shell for producing intense appetitive eating vs. intense fearful reactions; and anatomically distributed appetitive functions of dopamine and mu opioid signals in NAc shell and related structures. Such findings help improve our understanding of NAc, VP, and LH interactions in mediating affective and motivation functions, including "liking" and "wanting" for food rewards.