ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Opioid and orexin hedonic hotspots in rat orbitofrontal cortex and insula.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 209 citations in OpenAlex.
- The effect of intranasal oxytocin on social reward processing in humans: a systematic review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Opioidergic modulation of monetary incentive delay fMRI responses.Psychopharmacology · 2025Trial
- Effects of dopamine and opioid receptor antagonism on the neural processing of social and nonsocial rewards.Human brain mapping · 2024Trial
- μ Opioid Antagonist Naltrexone Partially Abolishes the Antidepressant Placebo Effect and Reduces Orbitofrontal Cortex Encoding of Reinforcement.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2021Trial
- Naltrexone modulates contextual processing in depression.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2020Trial
- Comparative insights into insula structure and function.Nature neuroscience · 2026Review
- Impact of environmental enrichment on heroin-induced neuroadaptations in the insula, nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area.Neuropharmacology · 2026Article
- What a stimulus predicts, not what it depicts, determines striatal reward signals.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Hedonic hotspot in rat olfactory tubercle: map for mu-opioid, orexin, and muscimol enhancement of sucrose 'liking'.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Optogenetic Hedonic Hotspots in the Orbitofrontal Cortex and Insula: Causing Enhancement of Sweetness "Liking".The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Changes in perineuronal net and parvalbumin expression in the orbitofrontal cortex of male Wistar rats following repeated fentanyl administration.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Basal Ganglia Dopamine Availability and Immune Activation Interact and Relate to Anhedonia Severity among Youth with Depression.Research square · 2026Article
- PET Molecular Imaging of the Endocannabinoid System in Psychiatric Disorders.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Review
- Changes in perineuronal net and parvalbumin expression in the orbitofrontal cortex of male Wistar rats following repeated fentanyl administration.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- Hedonic hotspot in rat olfactory tubercle: map for mu-opioid, orexin, and muscimol enhancement of sucrose 'liking'.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Demand for heroin in rats: effects of non-drug alternative substitutes and complements.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Multitarget neurostimulation of the deep brain: clinical opportunities, challenges, and emerging technologies.Journal of neural engineering · 2025Review
- Savoring Satiety: An Exploratory Analysis of the Neural Correlates of Sensory-Specific Satiety.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Behavioral economics of polysubstance use: The role of orexin-1 receptors in nicotine-induced augmentation of synthetic opioid consumption.Neuropharmacology · 2025Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Hedonic hotspots are brain sites where particular neurochemical stimulations causally amplify the hedonic impact of sensory rewards, such as "liking" for sweetness. Here, we report the mapping of two hedonic hotspots in cortex, where mu opioid or orexin stimulations enhance the hedonic impact of sucrose taste. One hedonic hotspot was found in anterior orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), and another was found in posterior insula. A suppressive hedonic coldspot was also found in the form of an intervening strip stretching from the posterior OFC through the anterior and middle insula, bracketed by the two cortical hotspots. Opioid/orexin stimulations in either cortical hotspot activated Fos throughout a distributed "hedonic circuit" involving cortical and subcortical structures. Conversely, cortical coldspot stimulation activated circuitry for "hedonic suppression." Finally, food intake was increased by stimulations at several prefrontal cortical sites, indicating that the anatomical substrates in cortex for enhancing the motivation to eat are discriminable from those for hedonic impact.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.