The research team led by Dr. Raymond Chan from the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his collaborators explored how people with high social anhedonia — a loss or reduced ability to experience social pleasure — process emotions in real-life situations. 

The research found that people with high social anhedonia tended to anticipate less pleasure, especially for social events. There is a significant gap between what they think they will feel and what they actually feel when these social events occur. The present work is one of the pioneering studies on affective forecasting in real-life situations. 

This study was published online in Schizophrenia Bulletin Open on 5 February 2025.

Affective forecasting is the ability to predict emotional responses for future events, which plays a crucial role in our daily decision-making and overall mental well-being. Most previous studies often overlook the complexities of real-life situations and social interactions, and little attention has been given to people with high social anhedonia. How do people with high social anhedonia predict their emotions in real-world settings? 

The research team conducted two studies.The researchers first analyzed 8,031 real-life events from 109 healthy young adults. They found that people anticipated and experienced social events as more pleasurable and exciting than non-social events. However, there was a bigger anticipation gap (i.e., gap between how they anticipated they would feel and how they actually felt) during these social events.

In addition, the team further examined 60 people, 28 with high social anhedonia, and 32 with low social anhedonia (totaling 2,066 real-life events). Results showed that, compared to participants with low social anhedonia, participants with high social anhedonia anticipated less pleasure and displayed larger anticipation gap especially for social but not for non-social events.

Together, these findings suggested the impact of social interaction on the anticipated emotions in daily life situations and characterized the affective forecasting performances people with high social anhedonia. People with high social anhedonia demonstrated significant impairments in various aspects of real-life affective forecasting, particularly in social contexts. 

These findings provide valuable insights into the cognitive and emotional processes of people with subclinical features of mental disorders. Such impairments in affective forecasting may serve as a potential intervention target for clinical populations. Future studies should further investigate real-life affective forecasting in clinical populations, and its relationship with anhedonia.

This study was supported by the Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, the Key Program of the Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation.