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Neuron May 2015Pleasure is mediated by well-developed mesocorticolimbic circuitry and serves adaptive functions. In affective disorders, anhedonia (lack of pleasure) or dysphoria... (Review)
Review
Pleasure is mediated by well-developed mesocorticolimbic circuitry and serves adaptive functions. In affective disorders, anhedonia (lack of pleasure) or dysphoria (negative affect) can result from breakdowns of that hedonic system. Human neuroimaging studies indicate that surprisingly similar circuitry is activated by quite diverse pleasures, suggesting a common neural currency shared by all. Wanting for reward is generated by a large and distributed brain system. Liking, or pleasure itself, is generated by a smaller set of hedonic hot spots within limbic circuitry. Those hot spots also can be embedded in broader anatomical patterns of valence organization, such as in a keyboard pattern of nucleus accumbens generators for desire versus dread. In contrast, some of the best known textbook candidates for pleasure generators, including classic pleasure electrodes and the mesolimbic dopamine system, may not generate pleasure after all. These emerging insights into brain pleasure mechanisms may eventually facilitate better treatments for affective disorders.
Topics: Animals; Brain; Humans; Pleasure
PubMed: 25950633
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.02.018 -
Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters Dec 2019To improve sexual health, even in this charged political moment, necessitates going beyond biomedical approaches, and requires meaningfully addressing sexual rights and... (Review)
Review
To improve sexual health, even in this charged political moment, necessitates going beyond biomedical approaches, and requires meaningfully addressing sexual rights and sexual pleasure. A world where positive intersections between sexual health, sexual rights and sexual pleasure are reinforced in law, in programming and in advocacy, can strengthen health, wellbeing and the lived experience of people everywhere. This requires a clear understanding of what interconnection of these concepts means in practice, as well as conceptual, personal and systemic approaches that fully recognise and address the harms inflicted on people's lives when these interactions are not fully taken into account. Bridging the conceptual and the pragmatic, this paper reviews current definitions, the influences and intersections of these concepts, and suggests where comprehensive attention can lead to stronger policy and programming through informed training and advocacy.
Topics: Education, Medical; Human Rights; Humans; Pleasure; Politics; Reproductive Health; Sexual Behavior; Sexual Health; Sexual Partners; Sexuality
PubMed: 31533569
DOI: 10.1080/26410397.2019.1593787 -
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 2019Negative symptoms are frequent in patients with schizophrenia and are associated with marked impairments in social functioning. The efficacy of drug-based treatments and... (Randomized Controlled Trial)
Randomized Controlled Trial
BACKGROUND
Negative symptoms are frequent in patients with schizophrenia and are associated with marked impairments in social functioning. The efficacy of drug-based treatments and psychological interventions on primary negative symptoms remains limited. The Positive Emotions Programme for Schizophrenia (PEPS) is designed to improve pleasure and motivation in schizophrenia patients by targeting emotion regulation and cognitive skills relevant to apathy and anhedonia. The main hypothesis of this study is that patients who attend 8 one-hour sessions of PEPS and treatment as usual (TAU) will have lower total apathy-avolition and anhedonia-asociality composite scores on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) than patients who attend only TAU.
METHODS
Eighty participants diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder were randomized to receive either TAU or PEPS + TAU. The participants were assessed by independent evaluators before randomization (T0), in a post-test after 8 weeks of treatment (T1) and at a 6-month follow-up (T2).
RESULTS
The post-test results and 6-month follow-up assessments according to an intention-to-treat analysis showed that the apathy and anhedonia composite scores on the SANS indicated statistically greater clinical improvements in PEPS participants than in non-PEPS participants. In the post-test, anhedonia but not apathy was significantly improved, thus favouring the PEPS condition. These results were sustained at the 6-month follow-up.
CONCLUSIONS
PEPS is an effective intervention to reduce anhedonia in schizophrenia. PEPS is a short, easy-to-use, group-based, freely available intervention that is easy to implement in a variety of environments (ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02593058).
Topics: Adult; Anhedonia; Apathy; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; Female; Humans; Male; Motivation; Pleasure; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; Schizophrenia; Schizophrenic Psychology; Treatment Outcome
PubMed: 30783071
DOI: 10.1159/000496479 -
Appetite Jun 2019The relationship between eating a healthy diet and positive health outcomes is well known; nurturing healthy eating among children therefore has the potential to improve... (Review)
Review
The relationship between eating a healthy diet and positive health outcomes is well known; nurturing healthy eating among children therefore has the potential to improve public health. A healthy diet occurs when one's usual eating patterns include adequate nutrient intake and sufficient, but not excessive, energy intake to meet the energy needs of the individual. However, many parents struggle to establish healthy eating patterns in their children due to the pressures of modern life. Moreover, healthcare providers often do not have the time or the guidance they need to empower parents to establish healthy eating practices in their children. Based on existing evidence from epidemiologic and intervention research, the Nurturing Children's Healthy Eating collaboration, established by Danone Institute International, has identified four key themes that encourage and support healthy eating practices among children in the modern Western world. The first - positive parental feeding - explores how parenting practices and styles, such as avoiding food restriction, allowing children to make their own food choices, and encouraging children to self-limit their portion sizes, can influence children's dietary intake. The second - eating together - highlights the link between eating socialization through regular family meals and healthful diet among children. The third - a healthy home food environment - explores the impact on eating practices of family resources, food availability/accessibility, parental modeling, and cues for eating. The fourth - the pleasure of eating - associates children's healthy eating with pleasure through repeated exposure to healthful foods, enjoyable social meals, and enhancement of the cognitive qualities (e.g. thoughts or ideas) of healthful foods. This paper reviews the evidence leading to the characterization of these nurturing themes, and ways in which recommendations might be implemented in the home.
Topics: Child; Diet, Healthy; Environment; Family; Feeding Behavior; Food Preferences; Humans; Parenting; Pleasure; Socialization
PubMed: 30797837
DOI: 10.1016/j.appet.2019.02.007 -
Psychological Science Jul 2022Resisting immediate temptations in favor of larger later rewards predicts academic success, socioemotional competence, and health. These links with delaying...
Resisting immediate temptations in favor of larger later rewards predicts academic success, socioemotional competence, and health. These links with delaying gratification appear from early childhood and have been explained by cognitive and social factors that help override tendencies toward immediate gratification. However, some tendencies may actually promote delaying gratification. We assessed children's delaying gratification for different rewards across two cultures that differ in customs around waiting. Consistent with our preregistered prediction, results showed that children in Japan ( = 80) delayed gratification longer for food than for gifts, whereas children in the United States ( = 58) delayed longer for gifts than for food. This interaction may reflect cultural differences: Waiting to eat is emphasized more in Japan than in the United States, whereas waiting to open gifts is emphasized more in the United States than in Japan. These findings suggest that culturally specific habits support delaying gratification, providing a new way to understand why individuals delay gratification and why this behavior predicts life success.
Topics: Child; Child, Preschool; Delay Discounting; Habits; Humans; Motivation; Pleasure; Reward
PubMed: 35749259
DOI: 10.1177/09567976221074650 -
Acta Psychologica Sep 2021Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people...
Many philosophers and psychologists have made claims about what is felt in an experience of beauty. Here, we test how well these claims match the feelings that people report while looking at an image, or listening to music, or recalling a personal experience of beauty. We conducted ten experiments (total n = 851) spanning three nations (US, UK, and India). Across nations and modalities, top-rated beauty experiences are strongly characterized by six dimensions: intense pleasure, an impression of universality, the wish to continue the experience, exceeding expectation, perceived harmony in variety, and meaningfulness. Other frequently proposed beauty characteristics - like surprise, desire to understand, and mind wandering - are uncorrelated with feeling beauty. A typical remembered beautiful experience was active and social like a family holiday - hardly ever mentioning beauty - and only rarely mentioned art, unlike the academic emphasis, in aesthetics, on solitary viewing of art. Our survey aligns well with Kant and the psychological theories that emphasize pleasure, and reject theories that emphasize information seeking.
Topics: Beauty; Emotions; Esthetics; Humans; Music; Pleasure
PubMed: 34246875
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103365 -
Current Biology : CB May 2017The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant...
The experience of beauty is a pleasure, but common sense and philosophy suggest that feeling beauty differs from sensuous pleasures such as eating or sex. Immanuel Kant [1, 2] claimed that experiencing beauty requires thought but that sensuous pleasure can be enjoyed without thought and cannot be beautiful. These venerable hypotheses persist in models of aesthetic processing [3-7] but have never been tested. Here, participants continuously rated the pleasure felt from a nominally beautiful or non-beautiful stimulus and then judged whether they had experienced beauty. The stimuli, which engage various senses, included seeing images, tasting candy, and touching a teddy bear. The observer reported the feelings that the stimulus evoked. The time course of pleasure, across stimuli, is well-fit by a model with one free parameter: pleasure amplitude. Pleasure amplitude increases linearly with the feeling of beauty. To test Kant's claim of a need for thought, we reduce cognitive capacity by adding a "two-back" task to distract the observer's thoughts. The distraction greatly reduces the beauty and pleasure experienced from stimuli that otherwise produce strong pleasure and spares that of less-pleasant stimuli. We also find that strong pleasure is always beautiful, whether produced reliably by beautiful stimuli or just occasionally by sensuous stimuli. In sum, we confirm Kant's claim that only the pleasure associated with feeling beauty requires thought and disprove his claim that sensuous pleasures cannot be beautiful.
Topics: Beauty; Cognition; Emotions; Female; Humans; Male; Pleasure; Sensation; Thinking; Visual Perception; Young Adult
PubMed: 28502660
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.04.018 -
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Jul 2019Experiencing pleasure and displeasure is a fundamental part of life. Hedonics guide behavior, affect decision-making, induce learning, and much more. As the positive and... (Review)
Review
Experiencing pleasure and displeasure is a fundamental part of life. Hedonics guide behavior, affect decision-making, induce learning, and much more. As the positive and negative valence of feelings, hedonics are core processes that accompany emotion, motivation, and bodily states. Here, the affective neuroscience of pleasure and displeasure that has largely focused on the investigation of reward and pain processing, is reviewed. We describe the neurobiological systems of hedonics and factors that modulate hedonic experiences (e.g., cognition, learning, sensory input). Further, we review maladaptive and adaptive pleasure and displeasure functions in mental disorders and well-being, as well as the experience of aesthetics. As a centerpiece of the Human Affectome Project, language used to express pleasure and displeasure was also analyzed, and showed that most of these analyzed words overlap with expressions of emotions, actions, and bodily states. Our review shows that hedonics are typically investigated as processes that accompany other functions, but the mechanisms of hedonics (as core processes) have not been fully elucidated.
Topics: Adaptation, Psychological; Affect; Anhedonia; Humans; Mental Disorders; Nucleus Accumbens; Pleasure; Prefrontal Cortex; Reward
PubMed: 31071361
DOI: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.05.003 -
Annals of the New York Academy of... Feb 2019Today, we see a growing concern for the quality of life of nonhuman animals and an accompanying call for viable means of assessing how well animals thrive. Past research... (Review)
Review
Today, we see a growing concern for the quality of life of nonhuman animals and an accompanying call for viable means of assessing how well animals thrive. Past research focused on minimizing negatives such as stress, while more recent endeavors strive to promote positives such as happiness. But what is animal happiness? Although often mentioned, the term lacks a clear definition. With recent advances in the study of animal emotion, current interest into positive rather than negative experiences, and the call for captive and domesticated animals to have good lives, the time is ripe to examine the concept of animal happiness. We draw from the human and animal literature to delineate a concept of animal happiness and propose how to assess it. We argue that animal happiness depends on how an individual feels generally-that is, a typical level of affect.
Topics: Animal Welfare; Animals; Happiness; Humans; Pleasure; Pleasure-Pain Principle; Quality of Life
PubMed: 30345570
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.13983 -
Annals of the New York Academy of... Oct 2022Music, thanks to its strong evocative power, is considered a powerful mnemonic tool for both normal and clinical populations. However, the mechanisms underpinning the... (Review)
Review
Music, thanks to its strong evocative power, is considered a powerful mnemonic tool for both normal and clinical populations. However, the mechanisms underpinning the music-driven benefits on memory remain unclear. In memory research, reward dopaminergic signals have been highlighted as a major modulator of memory traces consolidation. Over the last years, via behavioral and pharmacological approaches, we have investigated the hypothesis that dopaminergic-dependent musical pleasure is a crucial mechanism underpinning music-driven memory benefits. Our results show that the pleasure felt during music listening, modulated by both the dopaminergic transmission and participants' sensitivity to music reward, can increase episodic memory performance for the music itself as well as for nonmusical-associated information. In this commentary paper, we aim to review the main findings obtained from three different studies, in order to discuss current advances and future directions in this research area.
Topics: Auditory Perception; Dopamine; Emotions; Humans; Music; Pleasure; Reward
PubMed: 35877116
DOI: 10.1111/nyas.14867