A team of researchers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee looked at the role that dopamine plays in impulsive behaviour. It has already been established that dopamine plays a role in such behaviour but researchers were unsure exactly what that was.
Researchers discovered that impulsive people released more dopamine when under the influence of a stimulant than those who were less impulsive.
Joshua Buckholtz is a PhD candidate in neuroscience and team leader of the study. He commented: "The people who had the highest levels of dopamine release reported subjectively stronger cravings after we gave them the drug."
Buckholtz hypothesized about why some people are more impulsive than others. He added: "Our best guess is that perhaps there’s some inherited or environmentally mediated predisposition to having lower midbrain dopamine autoreceptor availability."
The study was published online in the journal Science. The team concluded that its findings suggest "a neurobiological link between human impulsiveness and drug abuse vulnerability."