Neuroimaging in Clinical Studies of Craving

Research on neurobiological mechanisms, especially the function of networks that underlie reward and cognitive control, may offer an opportunity to explore how existing treatments work and provide means for developing new treatments for substance use disorders. In this respect, the special issue of Psychology of Addictive Behaviors highlights efforts to integrate translational neuroimaging with clinical research by actively linking neuroimaging measures with psychosocial treatment mechanisms. Based on several of the articles in this special issue, mindfulness-based approaches appear poised to make rapid progress in terms of integrating neuroimaging with research on mechanisms that mediate treatment success. This commentary briefly discusses research on incentive salience and cognitive control networks in the context of addiction, followed by a discussion of specific studies within this special issue that address the integration of neuroimaging assessments in the context of mindfulness approaches. Future work may be able to leverage measures of changes in networks and regions that underlie reward processing and cognitive control to better understand how treatments work, especially for mindfulness-based approaches.