Incentive salience
Encyclopedia
Incentive salience is a motivational "wanting" attribute given by the brain to reward-predicting stimuli. This "wanting" is unlike "liking" in that liking is a pleasure
Pleasure
Pleasure describes the broad class of mental states that humans and other animals experience as positive, enjoyable, or worth seeking. It includes more specific mental states such as happiness, entertainment, enjoyment, ecstasy, and euphoria...

 immediately gained from consumption or other contact with stimuli, while the "wanting" of incentive salience is a motivational magnet quality of a stimulus that makes it a desirable and attractive goal, transforming it from a mere sensory experience into something that commands attention, induces approach, and causes it to be sought out.

It is often associated in the pathological situation when stimuli
Stimulation
Stimulation is the action of various agents on nerves, muscles, or a sensory end organ, by which activity is evoked; especially, the nervous impulse produced by various agents on nerves, or a sensory end organ, by which the part connected with the nerve is thrown into a state of activity.The word...

 are associated with drug
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...

-taking behavior that through this begin to reinforce themselves. Thus, if a person's addiction
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...

 is extinguished and he is then presented with a stimulus that has been associated with the drug in the past, a craving for that drug reappears. For example, anti-drug agencies previously used posters with images of drug paraphernalia
Drug paraphernalia
Drug paraphernalia is a term used, often with a slightly negative connotation due to its use in criminal law field e.g. "possession of drug paraphernalia", to denote any equipment, product, or material that is modified for making, using, or concealing drugs, typically for recreational purposes...

 as an attempt to show the dangers of drug use. However, such posters are no longer used because of the effects of incentive salience in causing relapse upon sight of the stimuli illustrated in the posters.

The incentive salience theory of addiction suggests that "liking" (hedonic value) of a drug may be dissociated from "wanting" the drug due to increased incentive salience. In fact, if the incentive salience associated with drug-taking becomes pathologically amplified, the user may want the drug more and more while liking it less and less as tolerance develops to the drug's pleasureable effects. Proponents of this model argue that this explains the development of uncontrolled addictive behavior
Addictive behavior
Addictive behavior is any activity, substance, object, or behavior that becomes the major focus of a person's life, during which they withdraw from other activities. Along with this, there are often other signs of having an addiction either physically, mentally, or socially.A person can become...

, which is not motivated by the hedonic value that caused acquisition of the habit in the first place.
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