Extinguished alcohol-maintained responding has been shown to relapse in aresurgence preparation when food-reinforced responding is subsequently extinguished within the same context. However, drug and nondrug reinforcers are often specific to different contexts. Accordingly, the present experiments sought to determine whether loss of an alternative source of nondrug reinforcement in one context could produce relapse to drug seeking in a separate context. In one experiment, rats made topographically different responses for food or alcohol in alternating components of a multiple schedule. Both reinforcers were delivered during baseline, alcohol was withheld during the second phase of the experiment, and finally both reinforcers were withheld during the final phase. Extinguished alcohol-maintained responding increased upon discontinuation of food deliveries, but may have increased due to similarity between the final experimental phase and an initial training phase. In a second experiment, the training phase that complicated interpretation of the elevated responding observed in Experiment 1 was eliminated altogether. Alcohol seeking again relapsed upon discontinuation of food, suggesting that the training conditions were not the cause of the observed relapse in Experiment 1. Thus, loss of a nondrug reinforcer in one context can produce relapse to drug seeking in another. This procedure may provide a novel model of drug relapse in which loss of context-specific, alternative nondrug reinforcers precipitates relapse to drug seeking in a separate context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTAHS/oai:digitalcommons.usu.edu:etd-1860 |
| Date | 01 May 2011 |
| Creators | Pyszczynski, Adam D. |
| Publisher | DigitalCommons@USU |
| Source Sets | Utah State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | All Graduate Theses and Dissertations |
| Rights | Copyright for this work is held by the author. Transmission or reproduction of materials protected by copyright beyond that allowed by fair use requires the written permission of the copyright owners. Works not in the public domain cannot be commercially exploited without permission of the copyright owner. Responsibility for any use rests exclusively with the user. For more information contact Andrew Wesolek (andrew.wesolek@usu.edu). |
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