Hedonic capacity is the ability to experience happiness and pleasure. Anhedonia is defined as the inability to experience happiness, and is also one of the negative symptoms associating with schizophrenia and related disorders such as depression. Most of the studies on anhedonia have been adopting a unitary concept of hedonic capacity. Most recent studies have suggested that hedonic capacity can be broken down into two facets, namely the consummatory pleasure and anticipatory pleasure.

Consummatory pleasure refers to the ability to experience the in-the-moment pleasure, whereas anticipatory pleasure refers to the ability to maintain and anticipate the pleasure in the future. Given that hedonic capacity is the subjective experience of pleasure, the use of self-reported measure will be useful to capture this ability in clinical settings. However, it is until recently that researchers are trying to incorporate this two-facet approach of anhedonia in clinical research.

The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS) is one of the very few scales specifically developed to capture the two distinct facets of anticipatory and consummatory pleasure. This scale was developed by Prof. Ann Kring from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been applied to schizophrenia research widely. However, there is no validation of the TEPS in Chinese settings.

Working with Prof. Kring, Dr. Raymond Chan’s team from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and Key Laboratory of Mental Health at the Institute of Psychology, has examined the utility of TEPS in a large Chinese sample of healthy people. They administered the Chinese version of the TEPS to 2275 healthy Chinese sample. They also conducted a 2-stage factor analysis for testing this scale, one for exploratory factor analysis and one for confirmatory factor analysis.

In addition to the consummatory and anticipatory pleasure found in the western sample, the current Chinese data showed that there were also factors that detailed the experience of contextual and abstract information concerning pleasure in Chinese. This finding is very important for us to study hedonic capacity in Chinese because it highlights the cultural difference between western sample and Chinese sample.

However, it should also be noted that further studies are needed that include a wide range of patients at different stages of the mental illness and different clinical diagnoses (e.g., schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorders) with specific anhedonia symptoms in order to determine further clinical utility of the TEPS in Chinese settings.

This study was supported partially by a grant from the National Key Technologies R&D Programme (2012BAI36B01), the National Science Fund China (81088001, 91132701), the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-EW-J-8), and a grant from the Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of psychology.

This study has been published online in PLoS ONE:Chan, R. C. K.*, Shi, Y. F., Lai, M. K., Wang, Y. N., Wang, Y., Kring, A. M. (2012). The Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS): Exploration and confirmation of factor structure in a healthy Chinese sample. PLoS ONE 7(4): e35352. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0035352