ArticleNature human behaviour2023
A mesocorticolimbic signature of pleasure in the human brain.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 36 citations in OpenAlex.
- A randomized proof-of-mechanism trial of TNF antagonism for motivational deficits and related corticostriatal circuitry in depressed patients with high inflammation.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Music Therapy for Reduction of Anhedonia: Protocol for a Sequential Mixed Methods Pre-Post Pilot Study.JMIR research protocols · 2026Article
- Integrating Sleep, Eating, Bowel Habits, and Physical Activity in Children and Adolescents: A Conceptual Review of the Four Kai Framework.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Neural Representations and Functional Connections Underlie Subjective Positive Affect.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Latent neural architecture organising shared aesthetic evaluations of visual artworks.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- 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
- Basal Ganglia Dopamine Availability and Immune Activation Interact and Relate to Anhedonia Severity among Youth with Depression.Research square · 2026Article
- Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Disrupted synapses: prefrontal cortex-reward circuit dysfunction in stress-induced depression-like behaviors.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2026Review
- The emotional life of animals.Cognition & emotion · 2025Article
- Pleasurable music activates cerebral µ-opioid receptors: a combined PET-fMRI study.European journal of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging · 2025Article
- A neurofunctional signature of affective arousal generalizes across valence domains and distinguishes subjective experience from autonomic reactivity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Deconstructing neural predictors of risky choice.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Opioid Regulation of Social Homeostasis: Connecting Loneliness to Addiction.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Decoding Mindfulness With Multivariate Predictive Models.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2025Review
- Enhancing task fMRI individual difference research with neural signatures.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- An intelligent humidity sensing system for human behavior recognition.Microsystems & nanoengineering · 2025Article
- Thalamic Volumes and Functional Networks Linked With Self-Regulation Dysfunction in Major Depressive Disorder.CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · 2024Article
- The expectations humans have of a pleasurable sensation asymmetrically shape neuronal responses and subjective experiences to hot sauce.PLoS biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Pleasure is a fundamental driver of human behaviour, yet its neural basis remains largely unknown. Rodent studies highlight opioidergic neural circuits connecting the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, insula and orbitofrontal cortex as critical for the initiation and regulation of pleasure, and human neuroimaging studies exhibit some translational parity. However, whether activation in these regions conveys a generalizable representation of pleasure regulated by opioidergic mechanisms remains unclear. Here we use pattern recognition techniques to develop a human functional magnetic resonance imaging signature of mesocorticolimbic activity unique to states of pleasure. In independent validation tests, this signature is sensitive to pleasant tastes and affect evoked by humour. The signature is spatially co-extensive with mu-opioid receptor gene expression, and its response is attenuated by the opioid antagonist naloxone. These findings provide evidence for a basis of pleasure in humans that is distributed across brain systems.
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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.