Anhedonia has been noted to be one of the prominent negative symptoms and core deficits of schizophrenia. Negative symptoms, particularly anhedonia, have been assigned a critical role in various models explaining the etiologies of schizophrenia. Subsequent studies also suggest that they are an indicator of genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia. In general, anhedonia refers to the diminished ability to experience pleasure or joyfulness. Although several studies have found that patients with schizophrenia report similar amounts of emotion in response to emotional material compared to healthy controls, less is known about nature of anhedonia in this clinical group, particularly from a non-western sample such as Chinese. Dr. Raymond Chan’s team at the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology has conducted a cross-validation study to clarify this issue. They examined the two domains of pleasure experience, namely anticipatory and consummatory pleasure, in patients with and without negative symptoms. The findings showed that negative symptom patients experience less anticipatory pleasure than non-negative symptom patients. Moreover, pleasure experienced was inversely correlated with clinical manifestations, such that the more severe clinical symptoms the patients suffer, the less anticipatory and consummatory pleasure they reported experiencing. These findings highlight the importance of taking the cultural factor in interpreting the emotional and interpersonal impairments observed in schizophrenia.
This study was supported partially by the Research Initiation Fund (O7CX031003) and the Research Fund (KSCX2-YW-R-131) from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the National Basic Research Programme (973 Programme No. 2007CB512302) to Raymond Chan
This study has been published in Psychiatry Research
Chan, R. C. K*., Wang, Y., Huang, J., Shi, Y., Wang, Y., Hong, X., Ma, Z., Li, Z., Lai, M. K., & Kring, A. M. (2010). Anticipatory and consummatory components of the experience of pleasure in schizophrenia: Cross-cultural validation and extension. Psychiatry Research, 175, 181-183.
|
