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Cortical Cannabinoid Modulation Of Subcortical Dopamine Activity: Implications For Emotional Processing, Brittany Draycott

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humans receive countless sensory inputs from the outside world to which they assign a certain level of emotional significance. However, there are times when an individual may assign an abnormally high level of emotional salience to an otherwise non-significant event, resulting in an inappropriate allocation of attention as seen in the hallucinations and psychosis associated with schizophrenia. Several brain regions are involved in this emotional processing, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA). We have previously shown that activation of mPFC cannabinoid (CB1) receptors in rats causes a potentiated fear response to a normally non-salient …