Dopamine enhances expectation of pleasure in humans

Press release - Links: Enhancing the effects of the brain chemical dopamine influences how people make life choices by affecting expectations of pleasure, according to new research from the UCL Institute of Neurology. The study, published today in Current Biology , confirms an important role for dopamine in how human expectations are formed and how people make complex decisions. It also contributes to an understanding of how pleasure expectation can go awry, for example in drug addiction. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in several areas of the brain that is found in a wide variety of animals. Its role in reward learning and reward-seeking behaviour is well established by animal studies - however, in humans its role is much less understood. Lead author Tali Sharot, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL, said: 'Humans make much more complex decisions than other animals - such as which job to take, where to go on holiday, whether to start a family ' and we wanted to understand the role of dopamine in making these types of decisions. Our results indicate that when we consider alternative options when making real-life decisions, dopamine has a role in signalling the expected pleasure from those possible future events.