Week 2

I found both articles to be very interesting in how they were able to show a possible connection between Dopamine neuron stimulation/inhibition (mostly focusing on VTA) and the altering of behaviors that they interpreted to be depression related. Although I don't think that dopamine by itself is to blame for depression because how do we explain why SSRIs work for depression which I think was also mentioned by one of the studies. The second thing is that VTA dopamine pathway has been implicated in rewarding effects. I think this might be an explanation for Sucrose testing results when the pathway is inhibited because those mice that go through this inhibition probably can't feel the rewarding effects of drinking the sucrose water, which I think is probably a big part of depression( not being able to feel rewarding effects). Going off the VTA pathway inhibition in the study I wonder if people who present depressive symptoms probably have that high of an inhibition in the VTA dopamine pathway, which again if true might possibly maybe undermine the study's method of just inhibiting the pathway that heavily because it's not looking at maybe a more realistic depression model. But Isolating the VTA dopamine pathway gives us important information in its role in depression, I would definitely like to see this information this study yielded to be implemented in the analysis of those subjects with a more generalized depressive symptoms.