Dopamine's role in the Psychological Architecture of Pleasure and Reward

Of the six most common neurotransmitters, dopamine is probably the one people know the most about. Dopamine is involved in controlling the reward and pleasure system in the brain. It allows us to recognize rewards and helps give us the ability to go after them. Learning, behavior, and cognition are also affected by dopamine levels. As with anything, if you have an imbalance, then bad things can happen. Parkinson’s disease can be caused by low dopamine amounts. People who have low dopamine levels can be addicted to substances easier.

The primary function of the nucleus accumbens in the brain is to be act as somewhat of a "reward circuit". Actions that are registered in our brains as a rewards include activities such as taking drugs, having sex, making money or eating food (Hall). Because of this message sent to our brains that are saying we have been rewards, dopamine and other neurons are triggered. According to Psychologytoday.com, “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain's reward and pleasure centers. [It] helps regulate movement and emotional responses, and it enables us not only to see rewards, but to take action to move toward them” (Psychologytoday.com). In other words, dopamine is another type of neurotransmitter that releases a “feel good” sensation in our bodies when we do something that brings us pleasure. This dopamine and other neurons have the ability to move themselves closer to the nucleus accumbens. After their arrival, they activate themselves and this activation results in the rise dopamine levels.

This research paper is a compilation of information gathered during lectures and through the web on the Nervous System and the Reward Pathway. This paper examines the structure of these systems, their discovery and the effects that drugs have on influencing these systems and how addictions are formed.

In the research presented by Howes and Kapur (2009), they have pointed out a possible concern to invalidate the dopamine hypothesis in schizophrenia as current PET studies did not holding a firm position in measure the dopamine level, they were more to a postulation of a generated estimation from the data. Furthermore, Howes and Kapur (2009) also stressed that the role of dopamine could be circumvented by using the antipsychotic drugs which effectively to the psychotic symptoms but neutral to the dopamine system, thus the role of dopamine will be less critical in schizophrenia. This is because most of the recent antipsychotic researches only prove that dopamine merely contributed in providing a solution in alleviating the psychosis-liked-symptoms but those symptoms are not the symptoms only existed in schizophrenia.

A popular joke among college science majors is “you make my dopamine levels go all silly,” in reference to the physiological function of dopamine linked to hormone secretion and emotional behavior. However, dopamine plays an important functional role in movement the generation of movement [4]. A deficiency of dopamine levels in the brain leads to many life-altering side affects experienced by patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is identified as a chronic progressive neurodegenerative disorder of the brain affecting the nigrostriatal dopaminergic system [1]. Among the basal ganglia network, clusters of nerve cells known as substantia nigra and their nuclei, synthesize dopamine by mesencephalic neurons [2]. It is the slow disintegration of substantia nigra that lead to Parkinson’s disease affecting

Dopamine plays a large part in the reward system of our brain, and helps us with

Our brains have a “natural reward circuitry” (34) that is triggered by the release dopamine in our brains. Dopamine works by having our brains “seek out new avenues for reward in our environment”. (35) It is through this

New discoveries on the treatment of Parkinson’s disease show that dopamine neurons can treat Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s disease is a disorder of the nervous system, which is a progressive disease. Parkinson’s disease is marked by tremors, muscular stiffness. It mainly affects people who are either elderly or middle aged. Although Parkinson’s disease cannot be cure lab grown dopamine can assist in being able to manage the disease in an enhanced way. Although Parkinson’s disease is not curable but can be treatable it still needs more work in order to make a cure in the future. Dopamine helps regulate movement and when there is a deficiency in dopamine that results in Parkinson’s disease.

The explanation of the processes in the nervous system, which lead to the distressing results of a completely changed lifestyle as well as behavior, is important for understanding the origins of the disease. For all movements/actions the body performs, the brain gathers information about the body position which comes together in the striatum. The striatum, in cooperation with the substantia nigra and other parts of the brain, sends out commands for balance and coordination. The substantia nigra produces dopamine, the neurotransmitter which is crucial to human movement and controlling of balance. In Parkinson's disease, there is a dying off of the nerve cells producing dopamine in the substantia nigra, resulting in a large loss of dopamine in the brain, which causes a disbalance in the dopamine/acetylcholine cooperation. (6)The effects are a lack of coordination of movements, manifesting through tremor, stiff muscles, difficult moving.

Dopamine is a brain chemical/Neurotransmitter that work as messenger signal between the Substantia Nigra to the next relay station of the brain, the corpus striatum which helps to produce smooth coordinate movement and also plays a major role to help control muscle’s movement. With Parkinson’s disease, the brain cells that produce dopamine slowly die, which lead to decrease production of Dopamine. The loss of dopamine causes abnormal nerve firing with brain and the cells that control muscle’s movement by sending the messages to the muscles; due to this it becomes really hard to control muscles movement and cause tremors and various other symptoms such as rigidity and difficulty walking and performing daily tasks. Dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter involved in Parkinson’s Disease. Norepinephrine is very relatively close to dopamine and is also involved in Parkinson’s Disease. Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease have loss of nerve ending that produce norepinephrine. Norepinephrine is a major neurotransmitter for sympathetic nervous system, which control many autonomic functions of our body; it causes increase in blood pressure and heart rate. Loss of norepinephrine can help us explain the non-motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s Disease such as fatigue, decrease in gastric stability and disruption in cognition. Parkinson’s Disease can be hereditary

In the past two decades, research on the role of dopamine in the brain has proceeded apace. A key finding is that dopamine is not the “reward” chemical, at least not in the way that the media would have us

The Dopamine Model (DM) has been around since the twentieth century (Preston, O’Neal and Talaga, 2017). The model believes that the cause of schizophrenia symptoms is from abnormal dopamine in the brain (Preston, et al., 2017). The premise is based off two observations. The first one is that antipsychotic drugs are able to bind and block the dopamine receptors (Preston, O’Neal, et al., 2017). The second observation is that the antipsychotic drugs increases dopamine which create paranoid schizophrenia symptoms (Preston, et al., 2017).

Inside brain ,dopamine plays important roles in motor cortex , motivation , conditioning and reward .Dopamine is produced in the limbic system particularly in ventral tegmental area and substantial nigra .Dopamine itself is also found in some food but since it can not penetrate to blood brain barrier we can not use it in regulatory function .

alcoholism, prior to Parkinson’s disease diagnosis (Weintraub et al., 2009).Low dopamine levels in the substantia nigra not only pose serious implications in the voluntary movement and walking of Parkinson’s disease patients but also in reward processing, motivation and positive emotions. Impulsive behaviours are described as the inability to resist temptation to carry out certain activities e.g. compulsive shopping which provide an immediate feeling of satisfaction and gratification for the sufferer and can lead to adverse financial and social consequences. In contrast, compulsive behaviour is characterized by an urge to perform certain action (Reference and Reference). Impulsive compulsive behaviours linked with the use of prescribed dopamine agonists include pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, punding, binge eating and hypersexuality, while dopamine dysregulation syndrome(DDS) stems from the compulsive use of levodopa (Raja & Bentivoglio,

In the article “Dopamine and Teenage Logic” by Daniel Siegel he states that “Dopamine is a neurotransmitter central in creating our drive for reward” (Source B). This indicates that dopamine is one of the key causes of risk-taking. Teens often take risks because they are focused on the reward they get after they take it, rather than what would actually happen to them during and after they take the risk. There are two significant ways that dopamine affects our brains; increased impulsiveness, and the susceptibility to addiction by the release of dopamine.