Social Neuroscience Meeting Aims to Improve Prevention, Treatment

Scientists and clinicians gathered in Rockville, Maryland, on October 1-2, 2007, to review initial research results from the burgeoning field of social neuroscience—the study of how neurobiology and the social environment interact.

The NIDA-sponsored meeting, "Social Neuroscience: Developing More Powerful Behavioral Interventions," was part of the institute's ongoing efforts to advance knowledge about the neural underpinnings of interpersonal interactions, emotional responses, and social behaviors that relate to addiction prevention and treatment. The payoff could be great. For example, an understanding of how effective patient-counselor interactions modulate patients' brain function could be used to assess and improve therapeutic relationships. Charting the brain dynamics that occur in healthy, positive social relationships, which protect against drug abuse, could open the door to more effective prevention interventions.

The October meeting explored seven topics: empathy, disruption of social reward in drug abuse, self-monitoring and responding to cues from others, prejudice and self-stigmatization, parent-child interactions among substance abusers, social networks and decisionmaking in adolescents, and mirroring the behavior of others.

What are the interactions between drug abuse and companionship and other social rewards? The answer may rely on combining what is already known about how addiction usurps the reward system with research on less-studied brain circuits—including the interoceptive system, which is made up of neural circuits that monitor and process sensations including pain, temperature, hunger, thirst, and touch, and has been linked with emotion and motivation. NIDA-funded neuroscientist Dr. Martin Paulus reported that his team at the University of California, San Diego, is developing a method to assess interoceptive system functioning during brain imaging. The team plans to examine whether activity of the interoceptive circuit differs between drug abusers and nonabusers.

Dr. Michael Otto of Boston University envisioned one way such investigations might eventually find application in treatment. Noting that brain activity arising from disrupted interoceptive processing may underlie a heightened vulnerability to anxiety, he imagined counselors training substance abusers to use biofeedback—real-time brain scans—to reverse the abnormal activity. The benefits of such "weightlifting for the brain" could include reducing patients' risks of stress-induced relapses to substance abuse.

NIDA Renames Addiction Journal

NIDA's journal on addiction, formerly called Science & Practice Perspectives, is now being published as Addiction Science & Clinical Practice. The new name highlights the publication's goal of encouraging the exchange of ideas between researchers, clinicians, and others in the field of addiction science.

The first issue of the renamed journal—December 2007—introduced two other major changes: an increase in the number of issues from one to two per year and the journal's inclusion in the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online) database. MEDLINE is the largest component of PubMed, an online database of biomedical journal citations and abstracts.

"Changing the name to Addiction Science & Clinical Practice reflects our ongoing commitment to bringing the latest in addiction science from the laboratory to the clinical field as quickly as possible," says NIDA Director Dr. Nora D. Volkow. "In addition, publishing the journal more frequently and broadening its access through MEDLINE will increase visibility and impact."

The journal promotes dialog between scientists and addiction treatment professionals with the aim of improving drug abuse treatment and research. It helps their programs keep pace with emerging knowledge and maximize treatment outcomes, while providing researchers with tools to construct new hypotheses and to design studies highly relevant to the needs of providers and patients. Each issue includes:

• Reviews by leading researchers of critical topics in the science of drug abuse prevention and treatment;
• Service providers' perspectives on what can and does work in diverse community treatment settings;
• Panel discussions on the practical implications of most articles; and
• Examples of successful addiction research-practice collaborations.

For more information and free subscriptions, go to: www.drugabuse.gov/ascp/.

Volume 21, Number 6 (June 2008)