Intense Sweetness Surpasses Cocaine Reward Summary

I grew up playing the game “Candyland”, and I dreamed of finding the golden ticket and living in Willie Wonka’s factory. I was also given a Gatorade after every sporting event I ever played in so what could be so bad about sugar? Sugar, real and artificial, can be found in almost every product we consume and although sugar is a simple carbohydrate that the body uses for energy, its impact on our body is far from simple. The consumption of sugar has been linked to a host of chronic health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The addictive nature of sugar is also a significant problem that leads to the other detrimental effects listed above. Sugar has also been useful to help preserve goods, fuel fermentation, balance acidity, and add flavor to other foods. Whether it’s cereal, spaghetti sauce, or yogurt, sugar is everywhere and has become unavoidable in our daily diets. As Americans, we have become accustomed to the sweet addictive taste of sugar, and our dependence on excessive amounts of sugar in its different forms has become alarming to many health experts. In analyzing preference and dependency with sugar, I will trace the addictive nature and major risks sugar has placed on society.

Throughout the articles, each one discussed the author’s perspective on food industries. Two articles argued whether the food companies should be blamed for the health epidemics or it should be a personal responsibility for consumers. While others discussed how food industries manipulate consumers into buying more of their food. Along the same lines, all the articles mentioned how the health epidemic is increasing and who must be fault for the growth. As well as finding a solution and who should help. Although the articles emphasize how obesity rate has grown, the public seems to blame food companies for manipulating consumers and others insist it is a consumer’s personal responsibility.

METHOD: In order to perform this experiment, the standby switch of the skinner box is switched to STBY (standby), in order to prevent the rat from starting the experiment before the experimenter. Then, the power switch is turned to the ON position, so the apparatus can be tested, and made sure it is functional. After, the Mode Switch is turned to Discrimination (DISC). Later, the Stimulus Intensity is set to 10. Next, the Response and Reinforcement counters are reseted to ZERO. Then, the room light is turned off, and the desk lamp is switched to the ON position. After, the rat is removed from the home cage, is gently placed inside the Operant Chamber, and the lid is safely secured. Later, the STBY switch is placed in the RUN position. For instance, during the experiment, the light will be on stimulus # 10, and the S⁺/Sˆ will be light off. Depressing

Progressive ratio schedules have been used to study the effects of different drugs or doses. The progressive ratio schedule is defined as increasing the ratio requirement (the number of responses needed to acquire an injection) following each reinforcement until there is no longer a response. The breaking point is the final ratio and is used to evaluate the efficacy of the reinforcer. Different motivational variables change the value of the breaking point. Increasing the dose of cocaine increases the value of the breaking point. On the other hand, pre-treating animals with spiperone or SCH23390 will decrease the breaking point. Therefore, it can be implied that both D1 and D2 receptors are needed to reinforce the effects of cocaine (Hubner & Moreton, 1991).

In the article rat park Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high. In a variation he calls “Kicking the Habit,” Alexander gave rats in

Now let's talk about sugar. It’s in just about everything we eat. On average the american citizen consumes 19.5 teaspoons per day, that adds up 66 pounds per year, for one person! That is a clear display of our addiction to sugar as human beings. Studies have shown that through brain scans it has been found that sugar affects the brain similarly to the way certain drugs do. In an article I read called “Sugar is a ‘Drug’ and Here’s How We’re Hooked” the author explained how studies supported that sugar consumption can lead to neurochemical and behavioral transformations that resembles substance abuse. The dangers of sugar have gotten so serious that research released by the American Heart Association shows that there are about 180,000 deaths

The Psychology Department is requesting permission from your committee to use 10 rats per semester for demonstrations in a physiological psychology class. The students will work in groups of three: each group will be given a rat.

Skinner (1948) was also influenced by Thorndike’s (1898) operant conditioning of cats and went on to use similar techniques to study conditioning in rats. Skinner studied how behaviour that is rewarded will be repeated, unlike behaviour that has a negative consequence. Skinner (1948) placed hungry rats in a ‘skinner box’ with a lever, when the lever was pressed, food was released and the rats soon learned that when they pressed the lever they would be rewarded. Skinner (1948) then placed rats in another box and administered them with an electric current. If the rats pressed the lever in this box it would stop the discomfort of the current. After repeating the rats quickly learnt to press the lever. Skinner (1948) argued that all human behaviour can be learned through operant conditioning (McLeod 2015).

The Mouse Party interactive experiment, released by The University of Utah, was quite an interesting and bizarre way to learn how drugs affect the brain. My prior knowledge on this subject matter was rather small, therefore my interest in this experiment was elevated. I chose to discuss three drugs that interested me the most in this reflection. LSD was the first drug that struck my curiosity when learning about the compound components to. Thus to no surprise, the rat that was on it was picked first.

Low income, crack-cocaine addicted African American mothers face many challenges as they seek addiction treatment. Limited research suggests that women who seek addiction treatment can potentially lose custody of their children to Child Protective Services Intervention. Ironically however, women in need of treatment for any other illness face no such threat of losing their children. Unfortunately, women with substance use histories often encounter criminal penalties or the lost of their children to Child Protective Services. Consequently, many of these women are afraid to seek treatment. Due to the social injustices faced by women with substance addictions, elected officials and policymakers should consider enacting legislation that provide

I was given the honor to work for the Neisewander Laboratory with Dr. Janet Neisewander, a behavioral neuroscientist who uses animal models to study mechanisms of drug abuse. I was involved weekly in the neuroscience lab. During this time I learned how to perform self-administration of cocaine on Sprague-Dawley rats. Also, I learned the brain anatomy of a rat, executed brain slices, replicated the DNA, performed jugular vein surgeries and took vaginal smears of female rats to determine menstrual cycles. Before graduating with my Bachelor's degree from Arizona State University, my lab team and I created a poster of our results from our female rats on ovarian hormonal status influencing 5-HT1B receptor agonist effects on self-administration

Five separate cages will be required to rear the different social groups of rats all under the same, regular light/dark cycle of 12/12. The first cage (enriched) will have many of the same features as the enriched cages used in studies used in (Douglas et al., 2012; Montarolo et al., 2013). The extra-large (140 x 120 x 120 cm) cage will have three floors connected by stairs. On each floor, there will be two water containers and one food hopper with positions changed weekly in addition to a running wheel. On each floor will be different arrangements of objects (e.g. different dollar store items, legos, tunnels, etc.) placed around the room, changed weekly. For the control, young, mid-age and aged cohorts, standard cages (80 x 60 x 40 cm) will be used (one for each social group) that is only a single floor with two water containers and one food

Do you know how much sugar you should be limited to each day? For women the magic number is just 30 grams, which is around six teaspoons and for men it's 45 grams, or nine teaspoons. That sounds like quite a lot, doesn't it? It may surprise you to find that the average person is consuming more than double that.

Many researchers have suggested that Pavlovian, or classical, conditioning may play a role in the development of tolerance to cocaine and other drugs in many organisms. Specifically, the rituals and environment that precede the drug administration become conditioned stimuli and the drug itself is the unconditioned stimulus. Hinson and Siegel (1999) discuss how when the rituals and environment associated with drug administration are encountered, and the drug is not delivered, organisms often display symptoms of withdrawal, sickness, and cravings. These symptoms are said to be compensatory responses, or

Research by Prof. Selena Bartlet from Queensland University of Technology, shows drug used to treat nicotine addiction could be used to treat sugar addiction. Pointing that sugar addiction should be treated as drug abuse. The research stated that excess sugar consumption elevate dopamine levels in the reward and pleasure ventral cortex of the brain, in a similar way to many drug of abuse including tobacco, cocaine and morphine.