for February is from Chris Cunningham of the Department of Behavioral

The highlight for February is from Chris Cunningham of the Department of Behavioral Neuroscience at the Oregon Health & Science University. In Dr. Cunningham’s highlight, he describes his initial introduction to the general field of taste aversion learning and the specific direction he has taken over the past 30 years. As he describes, the majority of his work on aversion learning has focused on alcohol. This focus has been within the context of assessing its rewarding and aversive motivational effects in taste and place conditioning preparations. For example, in the late 80’s Dr. Cunningham and his colleagues provided convincing evidence for the role of hypothermia in alcoholinduced taste aversions. This was one of the first assessments of the basis for the aversive effects of alcohol or for that matter any aversion-inducing agent. His demonstration of the role of hypothermia in alcohol’s ability to induce taste aversions stands out as one of the few such demonstrations, as the bases of the aversive effects of most drugs still elude us. Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to another interesting aspect of alcohol, i.e., its ability to condition both taste aversions and place preferences (in mice), an effect reported with a variety of other drugs of abuse. In this analysis, he has assessed the interaction or relationship of these different motivational properties using a variety of genetic techniques and models (quantitative trait loci, inbred strains and selective breeding). For example, he has reported that inbred mice strains show an interesting relationship between taste aversion learning (with alcohol) and alcohol withdrawal and/or the free consumption of alcohol. These assessments clearly support the position that the tendency to acquire strong alcohol-induced taste aversions is correlated in the very same mice with a tendency to display intense withdrawal from alcohol and to avoid its free consumption, suggesting that the aversive effects of the drug may be important to the likelihood of its use and abuse. In more recent work (using selective breeding techniques), taste aversion acquisition was again shown to be negatively correlated with alcohol consumption and preference, although unrelated to the induction of alcohol-induced place preferences, suggesting a genetic dissociation between these two conditioned phenomena. For the past 30 years, Dr. Cunningham has provided a creative and impressive series of investigations into alcohol’s aversive and rewarding effects. His highlight reflects these creative contributions that have increased not only our understanding of the motivational effects of alcohol but also the potential role of aversion learning to drug use and abuse.