Cognitive, Clinical, and Neural Aspects of Drug Addiction

Drug addictions are often difficult to treat. The most successful treatments begin with studying why individuals become addicted to drugs and how to change their thinking and behaviour. Cognitive, Clinical, and Neural Aspects of Drug Addiction focuses on the theories that cause drug addiction, including avoidance behavior, self-medication, reward sensitization, behavioral inhibition and impulsivity. Dr. Moustafa takes this book one step further by reviewing the psychological and neural causes of relapse including the role of stress, anxiety and depression. By examining both the causes of drug addiction and relapse, this book will help clinicians create individualized treatment options for patients suffering from drug addiction.

• Identifies key factors contributing to addiction, including stress, anxiety and depression
• Reviews inhibition and impulsivity in drug use
• Assesses the cognitive underpinnings of behavioral choices in addiction
• Discusses the argument of self-medication vs. reward sensitization
• Examines the psychological causes of why patients relapse

Dr. Ahmed Moustafa is an associate professor in Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience at Marcs Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development & School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University. Ahmed is trained in computer science, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. His early training took place at Cairo University in mathematics and computer science. Before joining Western Sydney University as a lab director, Ahmed spent 11 years in America studying psychology and neuroscience. Ahmed conducts research on computational and neuropsychological studies of addiction, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, PTSD, and depression. He has published over 150 papers in high-ranking journals including Science, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, Brain, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Nature (Parkinson's disease), Neuron, among others. Ahmed has recently published two books: (a) Computational models of brain and behavior, which provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in the field of computational neuroscience, and (b) Computational Neuroscience Models of the Basal Ganglia, which provides several models of the basal ganglia.