Reward motivation refers to the extent to which a person is willing to exert effort in order to obtain rewards. In everyday life, reward motivation is not fixed at some levels. Instead, it changes flexibly depending on the effort-reward ratio in a given context. For example, when the situation is favorable, people are usually more willing to invest effort, and vice versa. This ability to flexibly adjust motivation according to changing contexts is known as reward motivation adaptation. Depression and anhedonia are often accompanied by abnormalities in reward processing, but previous studies have focused more on overall reductions in motivation and have paid less attention to whether individuals can still flexibly adjust reward motivation as the situations change.
To address this question, Dr Jia Huang from Mental Health Risk Identification and Intervention Applied Research Center (in preparation) at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a team to conduct two behavioral studies examining reward motivation and its adaptation in individuals with subclinical depression under different effort-reward conditions. Using the Reward Motivation Adaptation Task developed in the team’s previous work, the researchers systematically manipulated the effort-reward ratio and measured two components of reward motivation: ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’. In Study 1, three groups of university students were recruited online: a high social anhedonia group, a subclinical depression group without high social anhedonia, and a healthy control group. The results showed that all three groups adjusted their reward motivation as the effort-reward conditions changed, with no clear group differences in adaptation.
Building on these findings, Study 2 further focused on female participants with subclinical depression and assessed broader anhedonia related symptoms using additional questionnaires. Compared with healthy controls, these participants showed lower overall reward motivation and a reduced tendency to adapt in the ‘liking’ component. Although this pattern still needs to be confirmed in larger samples, the overall findings suggest that deficits in reward motivation adaptation may not be a general feature of subclinical depression or social anhedonia in isolation, but may be more likely to emerge when depressive symptoms co-occur with broader anhedonia-related impairment.
This study extends current understanding of depression related reward abnormalities from the perspective of dynamic regulation across contexts. It also provides new behavioral evidence for identifying early motivational changes in at risk populations. Future studies combining neuroimaging and longitudinal designs will be needed to further clarify the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying deficits in reward motivation adaptation.
This work was supported by the Brain Science and Brain-like Intelligence Technology National Science and Technology Major Project , the Major Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Philip K. H. Wong Foundation. The study entitled "Reward Motivation Adaptation Deficits Are Specific to Co-Occurring Subclinical Depression and Anhedonia" was published in Behavioral Sciences. Xin Gao, a master’s student at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the first author, and Associate Professor Jia Huang is the corresponding author.
Other related publications from this team：
Yan, Y. J., Hu, H. X., Wang, L. L., Zhang, Y. J., Lui, S. S. Y., Huang, J., & Chan, R. C. K. (2023). Negative schizotypal traits predict the reduction of reward motivation in effort-reward imbalance. European Archives of Psychiatry Clinical Neuroscience, 273(2), 439-445.
Yan, Y. J., Hu, H. X., Zhang, Y. J., Wang, L. L., Pan, Y. M., Lui, S. S. Y., Huang, J., & Chan, R. C. K. (2024). Reward motivation adaptation in people with negative schizotypal features: development of a novel behavioural paradigm and identifying its neural correlates using resting-state functional connectivity analysis. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci, 274(4), 941-953. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-023-01640-8
Pan, Y., Wang, H., Zhou, Q., Huang, B., Pu, C., Lui, S. S. Y., Huang, J., & Chan, R. C. K. (2025). Dysfunctions of Reward Motivation Adaptation in Patients With Schizophrenia. Psych J, 14(6), 997-1007. https://doi.org/10.1002/pchj.70056
