Senior undergraduate student in the lab, Kelsi King, won a poster award at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society annual meeting!
Kelsi’s poster was selected by the SANS award committee in advance of the 2021 virtual conference. She co-authored the poster with another undergraduate student, Annie Ilsley, and the work was co-led by graduate student, Jaime Castrellon using data collected through a collaborative project between Duke and Vanderbilt.
King, K., Ilsley, A., Castrellon, J.J.F., Zald, D.H., Samanez-Larkin, G.R. (2021) Subjective responses to amphetamine are related to fMRI anticipatory responses to monetary rewards in the ventromedial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.
Abstract:
Psychostimulants interact with reward processing in the ventral striatum (VS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) by increasing levels of dopamine (DA). Prior studies suggest that differences in positive subjective responses to d-amphetamine are reflective of individual variability in general reward processing. Here we sought to explore the association between vMPFC reward sensitivity and the response to amphetamine. Forty-four healthy adults aged 20-65 years old received an oral dose of d-amphetamine (0.44mg/kg) using a double-blind placebo-controlled study. Participants completed the drug effects questionnaire (DEQ) over the course of several hours during which they indicated how much they “like” and “want more” of the drug. On a separate visit, participants completed the monetary incentive delay task during an fMRI scan to measure neural activation related to reward anticipation. Average anticipation-related activation within the vmPFC was negatively related to peak drug wanting (r(42)=-.346, p=.021) and liking (r(42)=-.30, p=.048). The effect for wanting but not liking was robust to inclusion of age and sex as covariates. An exploratory voxelwise analysis identified a negative association between wanting and clusters of activation during reward anticipation within the orbitofrontal cortex and temporal lobes. Plasma amphetamine levels were unrelated to DEQ wanting (r(36)=.275, p=.094), liking (r(36)=-.026, p=.875), and average vmPFC activation (r(35)=-.171, p=.312). These data suggest that those who have less pronounced cortical responses to potential rewards are more sensitive to the rewarding effects of psychostimulants.
