Abstract
Most of psychiatric disorders have been considered to involve abnormalities in frontal and limbic brain regions and neurotransmitters of monoamine. These brain areas and monoamines play a major role in value-prediction, motivation and decision making, which are essential brain function allowing animals including human to adapt to the environment. Monoamines modulate synapses to shape value memories in frontal and limbic regions. These value-related memories in different brain regions may cooperatively and competitively regulate decision making and motivation. Recent advances in experimental techniques allow us to examine effects of physiologically-relevant monoamine signals on synapses and to associate synaptic plasticity to behaviors. The mechanical understanding of synaptic function in value-memories, decision making and motivation would be the basis for molecular description of genes related to psychiatric disease in relation to general malfunction of adapting mechanism.
