A unified framework for addiction

Redish, A. D., Steve Jensen, and Adam Johnson. 2008. A unified framework for addiction: vulnerabilities in the decision process. The article gives a summary of some theoretical approaches explaining the essence of the addiction. The authors describe seven major types of such theories.
(1) Оpponent processes. This approach is, first of all, related to the studies of the National Institute on Drug Abuse under the supervision of Nora Volkow and George Koob. It’s main point is that the impact of alcohol and other drugs on the reward center changes its functioning, which results the replacing homeostasis, the natural harmony of neurobiological processes in the body with allostasis, the adaptation of neurotransmitter system to drug administration followed by the regulation of the process by this system. In particular, these mechanisms are used to explain the withdrawal syndrome that happens after an abrupt withdrawal from alcohol consumption.
(2) Processes based on the interaction with the reward system. We used to talk a lot about different aspects of this mechanism before. What we want to say is that when the reward center lacks natural stimulation a person artificially administers different substances to compensate the external dissatisfaction.
(3) Incentive salience. It’s a situation when admittedly neutral stimuli are related somehow to the addictive behavior. We’re going to study this mechanism in the nearest future. In this fragment we’ll just note that this concept can be reduced not only to the field of automated responses, but also to our consideration of the above-mentioned mechanism of the artificial construction of comfort when a person tries to connect certain reality elements to the pleasure center stimulation.
(4) Non-compensable dopamine. A hypothesis based on the understanding of the addiction as a wrong perception of the pleasure reaction (dopamine release) with a real success of certain social actions.