Introduction - brain and addiction.

Addiction is the compulsive engagement with an activity despite recognition of undesirable consequences. Although seemingly straightforward, discussions of addiction are often controversial, touching on people’s beliefs about the nature of responsibility and what constitutes healthy or unhealthy behavior. In this debate, positions have ranged from Thomas Szasz’s arguments for addiction being invalid as a medical concept (Szasz, 1960), to more recent trends in clinical practice where a wide range of behaviors are diagnosed as “process addictions.” Increasingly, addiction medicine has focused on the fact that both substances and problematic behaviors involve common neurophysiological pathways for reward and behavioral reinforcement.  As these topics are deeply important from both clinical and basic science perspectives, this special issue of Socioaffective Neuroscience and Psychology features discussions of the neural basis of addiction. (Published: 4 November 2013) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2013, 3 : 21840 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/snp.v3i0.21840