Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Executive Dysfunction And Reward Dysregulation: Interactions In Drug Addiction, Kristen Paula Morie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cocaine addiction is a serious public health hazard, and contributes to disastrous outcomes for individuals who suffer from it. Addiction is accompanied by an inability to control one's own behavior, and a preoccupation with cocaine at the expense of other rewarding pursuits. Previous research has suggested that difficulties with executive function and reward processing may underlie these problems, but the extent to which each contributes to addiction severity, or how these two factors may interact, remains to be elucidated. By using event related potential (ERP) measures in combination with information about self-reported anhedonia over three experiments, we set out to …