INTERACTION OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REINFORCING NEURAL SYSTEMS.

Evidence is presented indicating that the repetitive turning on and off of reinforcing brain stimulation is not a special property of restricted hypothalamic and tegmental areas. Results from a sample of 22 diverse hypothalamic, septal, amygdala, and hippocampal sites suggest that such behavior can be obtained from most neural areas from which self-stimulation behavior may be elicited. Questions thus arise about the location of aversive neural systems when aversion is considered as being expressed by the act of terminating positively reinforcing brain stimulation.