Anticipatory and consummatory dissociation of hedonic experience may manifest as anhedonia in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear if this temporal dissociation of pleasure experience is also relevant in other symptoms like social anhedonia in individuals prone for psychosis such as those with schizotypy traits.
Dr. Raymond Chan from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Key Lab of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, and his team have conducted a study to examine differences in the motivational patterns to various incentive types in individuals with higher and lower levels of social anhedonia. They aimed to test whether the dissociation of anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia pattern is relevant in social anhedonia, and how this “anhedonia paradox” would be reflected at the behavioral level.
In so doing, Dr. Chan’s team applied two incentive delay tasks involving different incentive types (money vs. social affective images) to a sample of 28 participants with elevated social anhedonia and 38 healthy controls from a population of 476 college students. The results showed that the social anhedonia group had comparable anticipatory sensitivity and consummatory pleasure towards monetary incentives as the controls; but they exhibited significant decrease in both anticipatory sensitivity and consummatory experience to positive social affective images. These findings demonstrate the presence of a domain-specific deficit in people with social anhedonia towards social affective information, and suggest that incentive types could confound the findings on the dissociation of anticipatory vs. consummatory hedonic capacities.
This study was supported by a grant from the “Strategic Priority Research Program (B)” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Science Fund China.
Xie, W. Z., Yan, C., Ying, X. Y., Zhu, S. Y., Shi, H. S., Wang, Y., Cheung, E. F. C., Chan R. C. K*.Domain-specific hedonic deficits towards social affective but not monetary incentives in social anhedonia. Scientific Reports, 4 : 4056 | DOI: 10.1038/srep04056
