Published in

Oxford University Press, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 6(11), p. 1017-1025, 2016

DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsw030

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Shared neural basis of social and non-social reward deficits in chronic cocaine users

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Changed reward functions have been proposed as a core feature of stimulant addiction, typically observed as reduced neural responses to non-drug-related rewards. However, it was unclear yet how specific this deficit is for different types of non-drug rewards arising from social and non-social reinforcements. We used functional neuroimaging in cocaine users to investigate explicit social reward as modeled by agreement of music preferences with music experts. Additionally, we investigated non-social reward as modeled by winning desired music pieces. The study included 17 chronic cocaine users and 17 matched stimulant-naive healthy controls. Cocaine users, compared to controls, showed blunted neural responses to both social and non-social reward. Activation differences were located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex overlapping for both reward types and, thus, suggesting a non-specific deficit in the processing of non-drug rewards. Interestingly, in the posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, social reward responses of cocaine users decreased with the degree to which they were influenced by social feedback from the experts, a response pattern that was opposite to that observed in healthy controls. The present results suggest that cocaine users likely suffer from a generalized impairment in value representation as well as from an aberrant processing of social feedback.