Effort-Related Motivational Effects of Novel Atypical Dopamine Transport Inhibitors: Implications for Psychopathology

People with depression, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric disorders suffer from fatigue, avolition, anergia, and other motivational dysfunctions, which can be highly treatment resistant. Animal tasks have been developed to measure effort-related choice, offering the option of high effort actions leading to more valued reinforcers vs. low effort/low reward activities. Such tasks are useful for preclinical studies related to drug development.