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Anticipatory pleasure predicts motivation for reward in major depression.
J Abnorm Psychol. 2012 Feb; 121(1):51-60
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22 Jun 2012
Confirmation, Interesting Hypothesis, New Finding
DOI: 10.3410/f.713947854.789352804
This interesting article suggests that the anhedonia of major depression may have been misnamed: depression anhedonia may not entail loss of pleasure per se after all, at least not for basic affective reactions.
Sherdell, Waugh and Gotlib report instead that depressed patients have only a reduction...Continue reading
Sherdell, Waugh and Gotlib report instead that depressed patients have only a reduction...Continue reading
This interesting article suggests that the anhedonia of major depression may have been misnamed: depression anhedonia may not entail loss of pleasure per se after all, at least not for basic affective reactions.
Sherdell, Waugh and Gotlib report instead that depressed patients have only a reduction of 'wanting' (appetitive motivation) in reactions to humorous cartoons or affective primes but retain normal hedonic 'liking' reactions (consummatory pleasure) to the same incentives once actually received. Sherdell and colleagues suggest that previous studies of putative anhedonia may have confounded the 'wanting'/'liking' aspects of reward and conclude instead that "the decreases in reward seeking behavior observed in depression are not attributable to blunted consummatory pleasure but instead are driven by deficits in anticipatory pleasure that disrupt the natural correlation between 'liking' and 'wanting' seen in healthy individuals".
Sherdell, Waugh and Gotlib report instead that depressed patients have only a reduction of 'wanting' (appetitive motivation) in reactions to humorous cartoons or affective primes but retain normal hedonic 'liking' reactions (consummatory pleasure) to the same incentives once actually received. Sherdell and colleagues suggest that previous studies of putative anhedonia may have confounded the 'wanting'/'liking' aspects of reward and conclude instead that "the decreases in reward seeking behavior observed in depression are not attributable to blunted consummatory pleasure but instead are driven by deficits in anticipatory pleasure that disrupt the natural correlation between 'liking' and 'wanting' seen in healthy individuals".
Acknowledgments
I thank Prof. Terry Robinson for highlighting this article.
Disclosures
Kent Berridge has published studies on 'liking' vs 'wanting' processes in reward, which were cited by the authors; however, he was not involved in this new study in any way.
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Berridge K: F1000Prime Recommendation of [Sherdell L et al., J Abnorm Psychol 2012, 121(1):51-60]. In F1000Prime, 22 Jun 2012; DOI: 10.3410/f.713947854.789352804. F1000Prime.com/713947854#eval789352804
F1000Prime Recommendations, Dissents and Comments for [Sherdell L et al., J Abnorm Psychol 2012, 121(1):51-60]. In F1000Prime, 25 May 2013; F1000Prime.com/713947854
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Anhedonia, the lack of interest or pleasure in response to hedonic stimuli or experiences, is a cardinal symptom of depression. This deficit in hedonic processing has been posited to influence depressed individuals' motivation to engage in potentially rewarding experiences. Accumulating evidence indicates that hedonic processing is not a unitary construct but rather consists of an anticipatory and a consummatory phase. We examined how these components of hedonic processing influence motivation to obtain reward in participants diagnosed with major depression and in never-disordered controls. Thirty-eight currently depressed and 30 never-disordered control participants rated their liking of humorous and nonhumorous cartoons and then made a series of choices between viewing a cartoon from either group. Each choice was associated with a specified amount of effort participants would have to exert before viewing the chosen cartoon. Although depressed and control participants did not differ in their consummatory liking of the rewards, levels of reward liking predicted motivation to expend effort for the rewards only in the control participants; in the depressed participants, liking and motivation were dissociated. In the depressed group, levels of anticipatory anhedonia predicted motivation to exert effort for the rewards. These findings support the formulation that anhedonia is not a unitary construct and suggest that, for depressed individuals, deficits in motivation for reward are driven primarily by low anticipatory pleasure and not by decreased consummatory liking.
PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1037/a0024945
PMID: 21842963
