Nonincentive accounts of drug addiction

A review of the role of DA in drug addiction would not be complete without an account of theories of drug addiction that do not posit motivation at the center of the stage. 

This is the case of the automatic responding view of Tiffany (1990) and of the aberrant habit-learning hypotheses (Everitt et al., 2001). 

In principle it might be a Pavlovian habit related to the establishement of a direct association between a Pavlovian CS and an UR (see Cardinal et ah, 2004). Another possibility is that automatic responding is an instrumental habit related to learning of an instrumental stimulus-response (S-R) association. An instrumental habit is more likely to account for the relative flexibility of the behavior as indicated by the ability to rapidly switch to an explicit goal-oriented mode when the automatic responding is impaired. 

This account of drug addiction might provide a phenomenological description of the behavior of the addict, but fails to identify its critical aspects. Thus, according to these accounts, the essential aspect of addiction is the automatic, habitual nature of responding. 

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