Anselme, P., & Robinson, M. (2016) | References

What This Research Found

Sign-tracking versus goal-tracking represents a fundamental individual difference in how brains respond to reward-predicting cues. When a cue (like a lever or light) reliably predicts that reward (like food) will be available, animals and humans diverge in their behavioural response. Sign-trackers become fixated on the cue itself—approaching it, interacting with it, treating it as if it were the reward. Goal-trackers, by contrast, orient toward where the actual reward will appear. This isn't just a quirk of behaviour; it reflects fundamentally different dopamine dynamics. Sign-trackers show heightened dopamine release in response to reward-predicting cues, not just rewards themselves. Their brains have assigned what researchers call "incentive salience" to the cue—making it a powerful motivator in its own right.

Incentive salience theory, developed by Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson, distinguishes between "wanting" and "liking." Dopamine doesn't make things pleasurable (liking); it makes them wanted—intensely motivating, attention-grabbing, and difficult to resist. This distinction is crucial for understanding addiction: addicts often report that they don't even enjoy their drug anymore, yet they can't stop seeking it. The wanting system has been hijacked. Sign-trackers, with their tendency to assign incentive salience to cues, are therefore more vulnerable to addiction. They don't just want the reward; they want the cues, the rituals, the anticipation. This is why casino environments, with their bells and flashing lights, are designed to capture sign-trackers.

Attentional bias—the tendency to preferentially notice reward-related cues—is both cause and consequence of addiction. Sign-trackers show elevated attentional bias toward drug-related or gambling-related cues. Their attention is captured automatically, before conscious awareness. This creates a vicious cycle: attentional bias increases exposure to cues, which triggers wanting, which leads to seeking behaviour, which reinforces the attentional bias. For substance use disorders and gambling disorder, this means that recovery requires not just abstaining from the behaviour but learning to redirect attention away from the cues that trigger wanting. The environment is full of triggers, and the sign-tracker's brain is tuned to find them.

Unpredictable reward schedules are particularly potent at creating compulsive seeking. Variable ratio reinforcement—where rewards arrive after an unpredictable number of responses—produces the highest rates of responding and the greatest resistance to extinction. Slot machines are engineered on this principle. But so, the review notes, are many natural environments. And so, the book argues, are narcissistic parents. When reward (love, approval, safety) is delivered on an unpredictable schedule, the dopamine system cannot settle into a stable pattern. It remains in a state of heightened activation, constantly seeking, constantly monitoring for the next possible payoff. This is the neurobiological substrate of obsession.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

This research is cited in Chapter 10: Diamorphic Scales to explain why children of narcissistic parents often develop addiction-like attachments to their caregivers. The chapter uses the metaphor of the slot machine to illuminate the neurobiological mechanism:

"The narcissistic parent is a slot machine. Sometimes Maisie's mother is warm and present. Sometimes she is cold and distant. Sometimes extraordinary effort produces reward; sometimes it produces nothing, or punishment. The child cannot predict which pull of the lever will pay out. This is the worst possible environment for a developing reward system—not consistent deprivation (which produces one kind of adaptation) but unpredictable reward, which produces addiction."

The chapter then explores the long-term consequences for the developing dopamine system:

"Consider what happens to Maisie's dopamine neurons. They are trying to build a prediction model, but the parent's responses follow no learnable pattern. Prediction errors are constant and large. The system cannot stabilise. And so it adapts the only way it can: by going numb."

This passage captures the dual tragedy of intermittent reinforcement in childhood: first the addiction-like hyperactivation, then the defensive shutdown when the system can no longer sustain that level of arousal.

Why This Matters for Survivors

Your parent was a slot machine—and your brain did exactly what brains are designed to do with slot machines. When affection, approval, or simply safety arrived unpredictably, your developing dopamine system couldn't build a stable prediction model. Instead, it stayed in a state of perpetual activation, constantly monitoring for cues that might predict the next moment of warmth or the next explosion. This wasn't a choice or a weakness. It was your neurobiology doing what it evolved to do: persist in seeking unpredictable rewards. Casinos exploit this mechanism for profit. Your parent exploited it, consciously or not, for control.

Your hypervigilance isn't anxiety—it's sign-tracking. That constant scanning of faces, tones, and moods that you do? That inability to relax even in safe environments? Those are the behavioural signatures of a brain that learned to assign incentive salience to cues predicting unpredictable reward. You became a world-class reader of micro-expressions not because you're naturally anxious, but because your survival depended on predicting an unpredictable parent. The hypervigilance that exhausts you is the same mechanism that keeps a gambler watching the spinning reels with fierce attention.

Your difficulty leaving or letting go isn't weakness—it's the "wanting" system in action. When survivors describe feeling "addicted" to their abuser, they're more accurate than they know. The same dopamine circuitry that keeps a gambler at the slot machine keeps you hoping for one more moment of love, one more sign of change. You may not even "like" the relationship anymore—may recognise clearly that it's harmful—and still feel an overwhelming pull to stay or return. This is wanting without liking: the defining feature of addiction. Understanding that you're fighting neurobiology, not just making bad choices, is the first step toward effective recovery strategies.

Understanding the mechanism is itself therapeutic. When you recognise that your brain was systematically shaped by intermittent reinforcement, the shame begins to lift. You didn't fall for a narcissist because you're stupid or because you don't love yourself enough. You fell because your early environment created neural circuits optimised for exactly this kind of relationship. Those circuits can be rewired, but first they must be understood. Treatment that addresses the addiction-like quality of trauma bonds—understanding triggers, building new reward pathways, tolerating the "withdrawal" of going no contact—may be more effective than approaches that treat the attachment as purely a cognitive error.

Clinical Implications

Assess for sign-tracking phenotype in trauma survivors. Patients who describe obsessive monitoring of the abuser's moods, difficulty disengaging attention from relationship cues, or who seem "addicted" to the relationship pattern may benefit from treatment approaches informed by addiction research. Standard cognitive approaches that focus on recognising the relationship as harmful may be insufficient if the patient is in the grip of incentive salience—they already know it's harmful, but cannot stop wanting.

Consider intermittent reinforcement as a traumatising mechanism. The trauma literature often focuses on the severity or frequency of adverse events. This research suggests that unpredictability itself is traumatising in a specific way—by creating addiction-like neural changes. Patients who experienced inconsistent caregiving (sometimes loving, sometimes abusive or neglectful) may present with more treatment-resistant attachment patterns than those who experienced consistent (even consistently negative) environments.

Apply addiction treatment principles to trauma bond recovery. Trigger identification, cue exposure with response prevention, building alternative reward pathways, and addressing "relapse" (return to the abuser) with the same non-judgmental approach used in substance use treatment may all be relevant. The patient may need to understand that going no-contact will feel like withdrawal, not relief, and that the urge to return is neurobiological, not evidence that the relationship is good.

Address attentional bias directly. Cognitive bias modification training, mindfulness-based approaches that teach attention regulation, and psychoeducation about how attention is captured by reward-related cues can all help patients recognise and redirect the automatic attentional processes that keep them locked into harmful patterns. The goal is not to eliminate the bias (which may be impossible) but to recognise it as it happens and develop alternative responses.

Prepare patients for the "boring" quality of healthy relationships. A nervous system calibrated to intermittent reinforcement will experience consistent, predictable love as understimulating—even suspicious. Patients may need explicit preparation for this, along with support in tolerating the discomfort of relationships that don't trigger the familiar dopamine surge. What feels "right" (exciting, intense, unpredictable) may be the pattern they're trying to escape.

Broader Implications

Gambling Addiction and Substance Use Parallels

The research was primarily conducted in the context of understanding gambling disorder and substance use disorders. The parallels to relationship trauma are not metaphorical but mechanistic. The same dopamine dynamics that make slot machines addictive make narcissistic relationships addictive. This has implications for how we understand, research, and treat relationship abuse: it belongs in conversation with the addiction literature, not just the trauma or domestic violence literature.

Social Media as Slot Machine

The variable ratio reinforcement schedule that makes gambling addictive has been deliberately engineered into social media platforms. Likes, comments, and follows arrive unpredictably, triggering the same dopamine dynamics that this research describes. Sign-trackers may be particularly vulnerable to social media addiction, and for survivors of narcissistic abuse whose reward systems are already calibrated to intermittent reinforcement, social media may be especially dysregulating.

Relationship Patterns in Adulthood

Adults who experienced intermittent reinforcement in childhood often recreate the pattern in adult relationships—not because they want abuse, but because their reward systems are calibrated to this kind of stimulation. Predictable love feels "boring" or "wrong"; unpredictable love feels "exciting" or "real." Understanding this as a dopamine calibration issue, not a character flaw, opens the door to intentional recalibration through therapy and conscious relationship choices.

Workplace Dynamics with Unpredictable Bosses

The dynamics described in this research apply to any relationship with power asymmetry and unpredictable reinforcement. Employees with narcissistic bosses may find themselves working obsessively to earn approval that arrives randomly if at all. The sign-tracking dynamic—becoming hyperattuned to cues that predict the boss's mood—is familiar to anyone who has worked for an unpredictable manager. Organisational psychology should attend to how intermittent reinforcement creates loyalty-that-looks-like-addiction.

Treatment Implications

Traditional trauma therapy often focuses on processing past events and building insight. This research suggests that for trauma bonds formed through intermittent reinforcement, treatment may also need to address the addiction-like component directly. This might include motivational interviewing, relapse prevention frameworks, trigger management, and building tolerance for the "withdrawal" period after ending the relationship.

Prevention

If unpredictable caregiving creates addiction-like neural changes, prevention efforts should focus on helping caregivers provide consistent, predictable responses to children. Parent training programmes, early intervention for families at risk, and public education about the neurobiological effects of inconsistent caregiving could all reduce the prevalence of adults vulnerable to exploitation through intermittent reinforcement.

Limitations and Considerations

Much of this research uses animal models. While the dopamine system is highly conserved across mammals, and sign-tracking/goal-tracking differences have been observed in humans, the precise translation of findings from rats to human relationship dynamics involves extrapolation. Human relationships are more complex than lever-pressing for food pellets, even if the underlying neural mechanisms share features.

Individual differences are substantial. Not everyone who experiences intermittent reinforcement develops addiction-like patterns. Genetic factors, other environmental influences, and the presence of other stable relationships all modify outcomes. The sign-tracker/goal-tracker distinction appears to have genetic components, meaning some individuals may be more vulnerable than others to the effects described.

Incentive salience is one mechanism among many. Trauma bonding and attachment to abusive caregivers involve multiple psychological and neurobiological processes, of which incentive salience is one. Attachment theory, terror bonding (Stockholm Syndrome dynamics), learned helplessness, and many other frameworks capture different aspects of the phenomenon. This research illuminates one important piece but not the complete picture.

Therapeutic application is still developing. While the research suggests addiction-informed approaches might help, specific protocols for applying these insights to relationship trauma are still being developed. Clinicians should integrate these insights with established trauma therapies rather than replacing them.

Historical Context

The concept of incentive salience was developed by Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson (no relation to Mike J. F. Robinson) in their landmark 1993 paper distinguishing "wanting" from "liking" in reward processing. This distinction revolutionised our understanding of dopamine's role in motivation—dopamine doesn't make things feel good; it makes them wanted. The sign-tracking phenomenon had been observed for decades, but its connection to incentive salience and addiction vulnerability was clarified in the early 2000s by Terry Robinson and others.

Anselme and Robinson's 2016 review synthesised these lines of research with the emerging literature on attentional bias in addiction, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding why some individuals are more vulnerable to gambling and substance use disorders. The application of this framework to relationship trauma—particularly the intermittent reinforcement dynamics of narcissistic abuse—represents an extension of the original research but one that is strongly supported by the underlying mechanisms.

From Sign-Tracking to Attentional Bias: Implications for Gambling and Substance Use Disorders

APA Citation