Can understanding reward help illuminate anhedonia?

OpenAlex İngilizce

The goal of this paper is to examine how reward processing might help us understand the symptom of anhedonia. There are extensive reviews exploring the relationship between responses to rewarding stimuli and depression. These often include a discussion on anhedonia and how this might be underpinned in particular by dysfunctional reward processing. However, there is no specific consensus on whether studies to date have adequately examined the various sub-components of reward processing or how these might relate in turn to various aspects of anhedonia symptoms. The approach to understanding the symptom of anhedonia should be to examine all the sub-components of reward processing at the subjective and objective behavioural and neural levels, with well-validated tasks that can be replicated. Investigating real-life experiences of anhedonia and how these might be predicted by objective lab measures is also needed in future research.