Reward System Components in Addictive Disorders

Abstract

There are some important components in the reward system include insular, prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortexes, ventral pallidum, nucleus accumbense, amygdala and ventral tegmental area. The origin of the dopaminergic reward system is the ventral tegmental area which is the dopaminergic neurons location and can activate the ventral striatum by sending the dopaminergic neurons axons to that. Ventral tegmental area influences the behavior and actions which would lead to ‘better than expected’ result and will be repeated in the future more frequently. Such result causes the ‘positive prediction error’ [1-5].