Context is a Critical for Psychoactive Drug Effects

Excerpt

Pouyan et al. recently reviewed more than two decades of human and animal studies on the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) using the Positive Valence Systems of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework [1]. Their comprehensive review demonstrates how RDoC can be successfully applied to a diverse body of psychopharmacological literature to yield mechanistic insights—for instance, that LSD can alter reward processing systems to enhance reward responsiveness. An equally important additional finding of this work is that the authors’ efforts to examine how their results might have been influenced by extrapharmacological factors were stymied by major gaps in the reviewed literature. Despite multiple lines of evidence demonstrating that serotonergic psychedelic drug effects are strongly influenced by contextual factors [2], such variables remain poorly defined, rarely standardized, and inconsistently reported. …