CAPEd Conversations
“CAPEd Conversations,” is the podcast series of Ohio University’s Center for Applied and Professional Ethics. The podcast is hosted by Christoph Hanisch and James Petrik (OU, Department of Philosophy). "CAPEd Conversations" invites guests with an expertise in ethics, moral psychology, and applied moral philosophy. Our goal in the conversations is to highlight the relevance and significance of contemporary debates, not only in the scholarly disciplines of the humanities but to develop, with the help of our guests, a better understanding of the practical challenges that contemporary societies are facing in the light of social and technological innovations.
CAPEd Conversations
Kent Berridge: Pleasure, Desire, and Addiction in the Brain
Wanting and liking for pleasant rewards usually go together. But the brain separates wanting and liking mechanisms, creating potential for the two to diverge. Addictive desires can arise even without expectation of pleasure or actual pleasure when reward is received. I’ll show a laboratory example as 'wanting for what hurts’, which can also create narrowly focused addictions. Counterintuitively, reward ‘wanting’ may also overlap in mechanisms with forms of fear. These conclusions have been applied to several clinical conditions, ranging from addictions, to anhedonia, to paranoia.
Kent Berridge is the James Olds Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Michigan