Trends in Motivation and Reward: Emerging directions and impactful research 2026

This Research Topic is part of the annual “Trends in Motivation and Reward” series, which highlights emerging discoveries, conceptual advances, and transformative research on the neural, behavioral, and computational mechanisms of motivation, reward, and decision-making. As theoretical and technological tools advance, the field is moving beyond simplified models of reward toward integrative frameworks that capture how motivation emerges from dynamic interactions among neural circuits, biological states, environmental context, and real-world behavior.Advances in behavioral and systems neuroscience, computational psychiatry, and reinforcement learning have reshaped how we understand reward-related signals, how they guide adaptive behavior, social interaction, and decision-making, and how their disruption contributes to psychopathology. A defining feature of this new generation of research is the recognition that reward function is not fixed but continuously modulated by biological and environmental context, from sex and developmental stage to neuroimmune signaling, stress, and environmental exposures across the lifespan. In parallel, computational modeling, digital phenotyping, and naturalistic assessment are transforming how motivated behavior is measured and translated across species and clinical populations, opening new routes to biomarkers, computational phenotypes, and targeted interventions for reward-related dysfunction.This Research Topic provides a snapshot of the most influential and rapidly developing areas of motivation and reward research in 2026. We welcome contributions that identify emerging directions, challenge existing frameworks, and advance mechanistic understanding from molecules and circuits to behavior and clinical phenotypes, bringing together researchers across neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, computational sciences, and pharmacology around innovative and translational perspectives.We welcome all article types including Original Research, Review, Mini Review, and Perspective articles. Contributions may address, among others:• How motivation and reward are encoded at the circuit level, including incentive salience, circuit plasticity, the interplay among limbic and cortical networks and the interactions between excitatory and inhibitory signaling pathways.• How sex, gender, and hormonal state shape motivated behavior, reinforcement learning, vulnerability to addictive behaviors, and treatment response.• The mechanisms underlying motivational dysfunction, anhedonia, apathy, craving, impulsive and compulsive behaviors across neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders.• Computational accounts of reward-guided decision-making, including reinforcement learning, goal-oriented behavior, reward prediction errors, value computation, and choice under uncertainty.• How reward circuitry matures across the lifespan, and how adolescent vulnerability, gene–environment interactions, and atypical reward processing may shape motivational trajectories in neurodevelopmental disorders, including altered motivation, reinforcement learning, sensitivity to delayed reward, and social reward processing.• How stress, neuroinflammation, and early-life environmental exposures, including pollutants, modulate reward systems and contribute to motivational dysfunction and psychiatric comorbidity.• The social and affective dimensions of reward, studied through naturalistic paradigms, ecological assessment, and digital approaches to measuring motivated behavior.• Translational and therapeutic advances targeting reward-related dysfunctions, from addiction, novel psychoactive substances, and eating disorders to neuromodulation, pharmacology, and emerging precision-medicine approaches.By curating high-quality and forward-looking contributions, this collection aims to capture the current state of the field while helping define its future direction. Topic editors: Liana Fattore, Esther Castillo-Gómez, Walid HLEIHEL Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82697/trends-in-motivation-and-reward-emerging-directions-and-impactful-research-2026