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Author Notes:
Jessica A. Cooper, PhD, Department of Psychology, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA 30322, j.cooper@emory.edu
Michael T. Treadway, PhD, Department of Psychology, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA 30322, mtreadway@emory.edu
We thank Katie Ris-Vicari for her help in creating Figure 2.
The authors report no conflicts of interest.
Subject:
Research Funding:
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers MH102355, MH108605] to MTT and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE-1444932 to ARA.
Keywords:
- anhedonia
- absence of enjoyment
- motivation
- interet
- depression
- pleasure
Anhedonia in depression: biological mechanisms and computational models
Abstract:
Anhedonia is a severe condition that describes a near-complete absence of enjoyment, motivation, and interest. A core feature of depression, clinical manifestations of anhedonia can include deficits in experiencing pleasure, approach-related motivated behavior, and learning how to match expectations to the environment. To date, the precise neurobiological mechanisms of anhedonia in major depression are still poorly understood. We have previously argued that contradictory findings and the inability to identify specific neurobiological substrates for anhedonic symptoms may result from sample heterogeneity, suboptimal methods of assessment, and the challenge of dissociating between different components of anhedonia. Recently, however, computational advances to the operationalization of psychiatric symptoms have enhanced the ability to evaluate the neurobiology of constituent elements of this symptom domain. In this paper, we review (1) advances in behavioral and computational methods of assessing reward processing and motivation and (2) the development of new self-report, neurological, and biological methods of subtyping that may be useful in future pursuits to expand our understanding of the neurobiology of anhedonia in depression.
Copyright information:
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
