The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the pursuit of happiness and more specific rewards

In pursuit of happiness: Striking a balance in the brain A cue that's reliably associated with a reward will prompt humans and other animals to think the thoughts normally evoked by the reward. These 'conditioned reinforcers' can vary from a familiar corporate logo to drug-associated cues. How they work is still unclear. Burke et al. studied conditioned reinforcement in rats in an experiment that differentiated between cues evoking thoughts of specific outcomes and cues that evoked general stimulus–emotion representations. They report that rats would work for either form of cue, and that the orbitofrontal cortex, part of the brain important in adaptive decision making, was important for conditioned reinforcement involving cues that evoked thoughts of specific outcomes, but not for those evoking happiness in a more general sense. An imbalance between the response to these two cue types is characteristic of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as drug addiction and eating disorders, where the response to a cue may be in direct contradiction to the desirability of the outcome. This work suggests that it may be possible to overcome this imbalance therapeutically.