Dopamine nigrostriatal neurons are important for motor control and may contain a particularly dense population of ryanodine receptors involved in the control of dopamine release. To test this hypothesis, we used a classical model of unilateral selective lesion of these neurons in rats based on 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA) injection into the substantia nigra. Binding of [3H]-GBR 12935, used as a p...

Apomorphine, a non-selective dopamine agonist, has been used as a pharmacological probe for investigating central dopaminergic neurotransmission in psychiatric illness. In this study repeated measurements of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were made in normal volunteers before, and after, the administration of apomorphine (5 or 10 micrograms/kg), or placebo. The difference in rCBF, before a...

Individuals with genotypes that code for reduced dopaminergic brain activity often exhibit a predisposition toward aggression. However, it remains largely unknown how dopaminergic genotypes may increase aggression. Lower-functioning dopamine systems motivate individuals to seek reward from external sources such as illicit drugs and other risky experiences. Based on emerging evidence that aggres...

The dopaminergic system is essential for cognitive processes, including reward, attention and motor control. In addition to DA release and availability of synaptic DA receptors, timing and magnitude of DA neurotransmission depend on extracellular DA-level regulation by the dopamine transporter (DAT), the membrane expression and trafficking of which are highly dynamic. Data presented here from r...

The best support for the hypothesized involvement of central nervous system dopamine systems in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia is the association between the affinity of neuroleptic drugs for the D2 dopamine receptor and their potency as antipsychotics. Discrepancy between the time course of receptor binding and the development of antipsychotic effects, however, limits this model. Preclin...

The agency facet of extraversion has been hypothesized to be based on individual differences in dopamine activity. Recent work suggests that resting posterior minus frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) slow oscillations (delta, theta) is both consistently associated with extraversion and sensitive to dopamine D2 receptor antagonist-induced changes in dopaminergic activity. Here we examine for ...

A large body of research shows that striatal dopamine critically affects the extent to which we learn from the positive and negative outcomes of our decisions. In this study, we examined the relationship between reinforcement learning and spontaneous eye blink rate (sEBR), a cheap, non-invasive, and easy to obtain marker of striatal dopaminergic activity. Based on previous findings from pharmac...

Fast-scan cyclic voltammetry in brain slices and postmortem tissue content assessment were used to evaluate presynaptic dopaminergic function in the caudate putamen and nucleus accumbens of adult male rats (1801 days old) that were prenatally treated with either cocaine or saline. Experiments were carried out to test whether there were differences in dopamine release, reuptake, autoreceptor fun...

Pseudoneglect is traditionally viewed as reflecting right hemisphere specialization for processing spatial information, resulting in orienting toward the contralateral, left, hemispace. Recent evidence suggests that healthy individuals differ from each other in both direction and magnitude of orienting bias, and moreover, the bias displayed by a person is consistent across time, suggesting that...

[3H]-spiperone binding on human lymphocytes did not reveal the occurrence of dopamine receptors. However, lower values were observed in Parkinsonism and the displaceable binding was increased after levodopa treatment although this was not specific only for levodopa and, furthermore, was not correlated with the clinical symptomatology. This non-specific binding in lymphocytes corresponds to trap...