Dr. Eliassen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati. He also serves as an Associate Director in the CIR, responsible for Information Technology resources. Dr. Eliassen received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Davis in 1997. He received his post-doctoral training at Brown University where he used fMRI to study motor learning. He transitioned into a junior faculty position at Brown and took on the responsibilities of Assistant Research Director at the newly established MRI Research Facility, where he continued his work in associative learning. Dr. Eliassen joined the Center for Imaging Research in 2003.

Research Interests

Dr. Eliassen's research interests focus on the understanding of the neural origins of addiction in order to improve addiction treatment. Specifically, his work encompasses two objectives: One, to identify the brain regions that participate in reinforcement learning and understand how these regions are affected by addiction; Two, to develop magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarkers of structural, functional and biochemical changes in the brain during addiction that can be used to assess treatment success. Overall his research program is geared toward the understanding of how addiction develops, the effect of addiction on the brain, and how treatment moderates these effects in successfully recovered substance abusers.

Current Research Projects

Identification of brain systems that participate in normal reinforcement learning in healthy subjects.

This research study is investigating a revised associative learning model of addiction, which postulates that separate brain areas represent reward and punishment. If the brain represents reward and punishment separately, we speculate that associative learning models could be successfully revised to account for addiction by the unequal action of drugs of abuse on the brain's reward and punishment systems.

Drugs of abuse directly and powerfully activate the midbrain dopaminergic system, which typically participates in reinforcement learning regarding ordinary rewards such as food. The obtainment of ordinary rewards activates the midbrain dopaminergic system, which then instructs the organism, the next time it is hungry, to engage in the behaviors that led to food reward. Drug addiction has been characterized as a learning disorder. Through the action of drugs of abuse on the dopaminergic system, addicted individuals learn to engage in compulsive drug seeking behaviors because these behaviors predict the reward of intoxication. The difference between typical and addicted reward behavior is that a hungry animal will eat until it is satiated and then satisfy other needs, while a drug addict's desire for intoxication prevails over the desire to maintain a rewarding lifestyle, including good health, satisfactory job performance, and strong social relationships. In most people the negative consequences of a deteriorating lifestyle outweigh the reward of intoxication and drug abuse does not lead to addiction. In other words, the punishments outweigh the rewards at some point for most people. Reinforcement learning models do not distinguish between reward and punishment as effective reinforcers of behavior, but addiction apparently distinguishes reward and punishment because the reward of intoxication outweighs the punishments of continued drug abuse.

Identification of brain biomarkers of drug abuse and addiction using structural, functional and spectroscopic MR imaging.

The identification of biomarkers could provide clinicians and researchers with methods to assess the severity of substance dependence or the ability to gauge treatment success. This study aims to determine if MDMA, one of many stimulant drugs of abuse, alters the structure, function and biochemistry of the human brain. MDMA (ecstasy) is an amphetamine derivative, 3,4--methylene-dioxy-methamphetamine, and is a popular club drug. Evidence in laboratory animals strongly suggests that MDMA causes damage to serotonin containing nerve cells and that this damage subsequently impairs memory function. The evidence for serotonin damage and memory impairment in humans is not clear and has been seen by the popular press as evidence that MDMA poses little danger to recreational users. This unfortunate circumstance arises largely because there is little correspondence among current published studies as to the neurotoxic effects of MDMA in human recreational users. The goal of my research is to assess the structural, functional and biochemical differences between the brains of heavy MDMA users and matched comparison subjects. These measures will then be correlated with behavioral measures of memory impairment.

The findings from this study will guide future work that aims to identify similar changes in cocaine abusers who are being treated through the Cincinnati Addiction Research Center. The long-term objective of this research will be to determine if the changes associated with stimulant abuse are reversed by treatment or if changes in brain imaging measures subsequent to treatment initiation predict treatment effectiveness.

Selected recent publications

  • Jennifer A. Kim, James C. Eliassen, and Jerome N. Sanes, Movement Quantity and Frequency Coding in Human Motor Areas, J Neurophysiol, 2005.
  • Rachel S. Herz, James Eliassen, Sophia Beland, Timothy Souza, Neuroimaging evidence for the emotional potency of odor-evoked memory, Neuropsychologia, Vol. 42, 2004, pp. 371-378. [PDF]
  • James C. Eliassen, Timothy Souza, and Jerome N. Sanes, Experience-Dependent Activation Patterns in Human Brain during Visual-Motor Associative Learning, The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 23, No. 33, November, 2003, pp. 10540 –10547. [PDF]
  • Jesse Rissman, James C. Eliassen, and Sheila E. Blumstein, An Event-Related fMRI Investigation of Implicit Semantic Priming, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 15, No.8, 2003, pp. 1160–1175. [PDF]
  • Bettina D. Acuna, James C. Eliassen, John P. Donoghue and Jerome N. Sanes, Frontal and Parietal Lobe Activation during Transitive Inference in Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Vol. 12, December 2002, pp. 1312-1321. [PDF]
  • James C. Eliassen, Kathleen Baynes and Michael S. Gazzaniga, Anterior and Posterior Callosal Contributions to Simultaneous Bimanual Movements of the Hands and Fingers, Brain, Vol. 123, 2000, pp. 2501-2511. [PDF]
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