REVIEW ON CPP: Measuring reward with the conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm: update of the last decade

Abstract

Conditioned place preference (CPP) continues to be one of the most popular models to study the motivational effects of drugs and non-drug treatments in experimental animals. This is obvious from a steady year-to-year increase in the number of publications reporting the use this model. Since the compilation of the preceding review in 1998, more than 1000 new studies using place conditioning have been published, and the aim of the present review is to provide an overview of these recent publications. There are a number of trends and developments that are obvious in the literature of the last decade. First, as more and more knockout and transgenic animals become available, place conditioning is increasingly used to assess the motivational effects of drugs or non-drug rewards in genetically modified animals. Second, there is a still small but growing literature on the use of place conditioning to study the motivational aspects of pain, a field of pre-clinical research that has so far received little attention, because of the lack of appropriate animal models. Third, place conditioning continues to be widely used to study tolerance and sensitization to the rewarding effects of drugs induced by pre-treatment regimens. Fourth, extinction/reinstatement procedures in place conditioning are becoming increasingly popular. This interesting approach is thought to model certain aspects of relapse to addictive behavior and has previously almost exclusively been studied in drug self-administration paradigms. It has now also become established in the place conditioning literature and provides an additional and technically easy approach to this important phenomenon. The enormous number of studies to be covered in this review prevented in-depth discussion of many methodological, pharmacological or neurobiological aspects; to a large extent, the presentation of data had to be limited to a short and condensed summary of the most relevant findings.

Incentive salience of cocaine across the postpartum period of the female rat

“…CPP is a widely used Pavlovian conditioning procedure used to assess the motivation or incentive value attributed to various natural or pharmacological stimuli, like cocaine (Mucha et al 1982;Tzschentke 1998Tzschentke , 2007Bardo and Bevins 2000). In CPP, the incentive value of a stimulus is represented by a subject's conditioned response to seek out the stimulus in an environment where the stimulus was previously presented but is not currently available (Schechter and Calcagnetti 1998;Tzschentke 2007).…”

“…In CPP, the incentive value of a stimulus is represented by a subject's conditioned response to seek out the stimulus in an environment where the stimulus was previously presented but is not currently available (Schechter and Calcagnetti 1998;Tzschentke 2007). Thus, CPP can provide important insight into the initial phases of the postpartum female's motivated response toward cocaine while in a drug-free state.…”

Variation in CYP2A6 and tobacco dependence throughout adolescence and in young adult smokers

“…The effect of slower nicotine metabolism on nicotine-mediated reward was recently characterized in nicotine-naïve adult mice (Bagdas et al, 2014). Slower nicotine metabolism, achieved through methoxsalenmediated inhibition of CYP2A5 (the murine ortholog of human CYP2A6), caused animals to display a preference for nicotine in the conditioned place preference paradigm (Bagdas et al, 2014), suggestive of greater reward (Tzschentke, 2007). If these findings extend to novice smokers, those with slow nicotine metabolism may also experience greater reward during initial smoking experiences, potentially due to greater nicotine exposure, increasing their risk for developing nicotine dependence.…”

Disruption of dopamine D1 receptor phosphorylation at serine 421 attenuates cocaine-induced behaviors in mice

“…CPP is a widely-used, standard procedure for assessing the rewarding effects of drugs in rodent models [13,14] . We therefore determined whether cocaine-induced CPP was altered in Tg-S421A mice.…”