Imagine a person has random psychosomatic itching and applies an ointment which brings relief. Could their brain wrongly assosiate the process that causes the itching as good as it brought relief?
As Berridge, 2020 recently showed, there's a difference between wanting and liking something and dopamine (which is said to work on the basis of operant conditioning) is rather assosiated with wanting. I wondered whether the brain can decypher when the operant conditioning creates a harmful feedback loop.
I would appreciate any literature recommendations which would bring me closer to the answer.