Overview
Addiction is a behavioral disorder involving a dependency – physical or psychological – that typically negatively disrupts an individual’s life. Although historically understood primarily in terms of drugs (especially tobacco and alcohol for adolescents), addiction now is understood as encompassing behaviors and activities such as Internet use and sexual addiction largely due to commonalities in dopamine and reward-circuit functions among all addictions. As that new understanding suggests, addictions experienced by adolescents now increasingly are understood from a neuroscience perspective. Indeed, adolescent addiction as a brain disease has come to be quite well-understood in terms of how it differs from adult addiction. Behavioral, environmental, and social factors have also been found to aggravate or mitigate adolescent addiction. This rapidly growing area of research continues to answer many questions, but much remains unknown about withdrawal and treatment.
Addiction in...
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Levesque, R.J.R. (2016). Addiction. In: Levesque, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Adolescence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_486-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32132-5_486-2
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