Schizophrenia is associated with a wide range of cognitive and emotional impairments including the reduced ability to experience pleasure and happiness, namely anhedonia. Anhedonia has been considered to be one of the key negative symptoms predicting the prognosis and functional recovery for patients with schizophrenia.

Dr. Raymond Chan from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory of the Institute of Psychology and his collaborators have recently made a critical review to illustrate anhedonia is not limited to schizophrenia spectrum disorders but shared by other related disorders and their subclinical counterparts.

In particular, they selective reviewed the current evidence regarding value representation of reward, prospection, emotion-behaviour decoupling, and belief updating in the Chinese setting, covering both behavioural and neuroimaging research. These findings highlighted the aforementioned constructs and their important roles in anhedonia across and beyond the schizophrenia spectrum disorders. These findings help to validate and establish a set of measures to characterize the evaluation of anhedonia and highlight potential development of intervention platform for anhedonia across clinical and subclinical populations.

This review was partly supported by the STI2030-Major Projects and the Philip K. H. Foundation to Dr. Raymond Chan and the General Research Fund to Dr. Simon Lui.

This review entitled "Anhedonia across and beyond the schizophrenia spectrum. Schizophrenia Bulletin" is now published online in Schizophrenia Bulletin on Sep. 29, 2024.

Related publication

1. Chan, R. C. K.*, Wang, L. L., Lui, S. S. Y. (2022). Theories and models of negative symptoms in schizophrenia and clinical implications. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, 454–467

2. Hu, H. X., Liu, C., Zhang, J. B., Wang, L. L., Chu, M. Y., Li, S. B., Lv, Q. Y., Lui, S. S. Y., Hui, L., Yi, Z. H.*, Chan, R. C. K.* (2023). A transdiagnostic network analysis of motivation and pleasure, expressivity and social functioning. Nature Mental Health.