Question

Dopamine is implicated in many ways. Pick two concepts and explain the role DA plays.

Answer 1

1. Dopamine and reward motivation: Dopamine is primarily responsible in regulating how a desirable stimulus is perceived, approached and experienced. In other words, dopamine mediates the salience of an incentive which signals the value of its reward to the organism and motivates action required for attaining it.

2. Dopamine and psychosis: The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, a severe mental illness characterised by breaks from reality, posits that symptoms of schizophrenia (like psychoses) can be attributed to a disturbed and hyperactive dopaminergic signal transduction.