Psychopharmacologic facilitation of psychosocial therapy of violence and hyperkinesis

Experiments on naturally occurring hyperkinetic and violent dogs and cats demonstrated the usefulness of low dosages of amphetamine (0,2-1,0 mg/kg per os) in inhibiting these nonadaptive forms of behavior, permitting the development of discriminated Pavlovian and operant conditional responses. When amphetamine therapy was combined systematically with conditioning experiments and psychosocial therapy, for long enough periods of time (many weeks), the beneficial effects of this drug persisted in the nodrug state, i.e. the learning was not state-dependent. Amphetamine also ameliorated significantly conditional emotional visceral responses in dogs with low adaptation to psychologically stressful situations. The same low dosage of amphetamine which improved the behavior and learning of hyperkinetic and violent dogs disrupted the behavior and produced disorientation in normal dogs with previously stable conditional responses.