ArticleNeuroscience2022
The Arousal-motor Hypothesis of Dopamine Function: Evidence that Dopamine Facilitates Reward Seeking in Part by Maintaining Arousal.
Article in Neuroscience, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 20 citations in OpenAlex.
- The COMT rs4680 SNP participates in the regulation of the arousal threshold in patients with obstructive sleep apnea.Sleep & breathing = Schlaf & Atmung · 2026Observational
- Dopamine Supports Reward Prediction to Shape Reward-Pursuit Strategy.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Dopamine Responses in Medial Frontal Cortex Are More Consistent with a Generalized Arousal Signal Than Signed Reward Prediction Errors.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- The importance of dopamine levels and single-nucleotide polymorphism withinAnnals of medicine · 2025Article
- Superior Colliculus Projections Drive Dopamine Neuron Activity and Movement But Not Value.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Silicon Dioxide Nanoparticles Alter Social Behavior, Color Preference, Oxidative Stress Markers, and Histological Structure of Brain Regions in Zebrafish (Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Superior colliculus projections drive dopamine neuron activity and movement but not value.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Exploring the induction and measurement of positive affective state in equines through a personality-centred lens.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Functional neuroanatomy of dopaminergic arousal systems: implications for the wake-promoting effect of psychostimulants, with particular reference to modafinil.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2025Review
- Nucleus Accumbens Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone Neurons Projecting to the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis Promote Wakefulness and Positive Affective State.Neuroscience bulletin · 2024Article
- Nucleus accumbens and dorsal medial striatal dopamine and neural activity are essential for action sequence performance.The European journal of neuroscience · 2024Article
- Metabolic hormone action in the VTA: Reward-directed behavior and mechanistic insights.Physiology & behavior · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Dopamine facilitates approach to reward via its actions on dopamine receptors in the nucleus accumbens. For example, blocking either D1 or D2 dopamine receptors in the accumbens reduces the proportion of reward-predictive cues to which rats respond with cued approach. Recent evidence indicates that accumbens dopamine also promotes wakefulness and arousal, but the relationship between dopamine's roles in arousal and reward seeking remains unexplored. Here, we show that the ability of systemic or intra-accumbens injections of the D1 antagonist SCH23390 to reduce cued approach to reward depends on the animal's state of arousal. Handling the animal, a manipulation known to increase arousal, was sufficient to reverse the behavioral effects of the antagonist. In addition, SCH23390 reduced spontaneous locomotion and increased time spent in sleep postures, both consistent with reduced arousal, but also increased time spent immobile in postures inconsistent with sleep. In contrast, the ability of the D2 antagonist haloperidol to reduce cued approach was not reversible by handling. Haloperidol reduced spontaneous locomotion but did not increase sleep postures, instead increasing immobility in non-sleep postures. We place these results in the context of the extensive literature on dopamine's contributions to behavior, and propose the arousal-motor hypothesis. This novel synthesis, which proposes that two main functions of dopamine are to promote arousal and facilitate motor behavior, accounts both for our findings and many previous behavioral observations that have led to disparate and conflicting conclusions.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.