| Summary: | Environmental stimuli, or cues, present during the drug taking experience become powerful reinforcers of drug seeking and drug taking behaviors and play a central role in several theories of drug addiction. This is demonstrated by animal models of addictive-like behaviors, which have shown that drug-related cues contribute to the acquisition, maintenance, and relapse to drug-motivated behaviors. Clinical findings suggest that cues and contexts associated with drug use can incite relapse in formerly dependent individuals trying to abstain from drug use. Furthermore, experimental evidence from substance-dependent human populations have shown that drug cues elicit a range of subjective, cognitive, and physiological responses and that variation in these responses can predict relapse. However, little information exists on the acquisition of these drug-cue associations in humans, or on the mechanisms underlying the variation in responses to drug cues. Controlled studies are critical to gain better understanding of the acquisition of these responses, potential implications of the differences in the response modality, and determinants of variation in the expression of such responses to attenuate their influence on drug motivated behaviors.
This dissertation describes the implementation of a novel human drug conditioning paradigm in which we can study both the acquisition and expression of responses to drug-associated cues in humans. In study one, we describe the paradigm and its production of enhanced behavioral preference towards a methamphetamine-associated cue. In study 2, we extend the paradigm to include objective measures of conditioned response, including emotional reactivity and attention bias. In study 3, we further extend the research to a different drug of abuse; alcohol. Overall, we demonstrate that humans acquire associations between drugs environmental stimuli present in the drug taking experience. Furthermore, our findings suggest that subjective drug effects may play a key role in the acquisition of these associations.
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