Citation

Pushkarskaya H, Sobowale K, Henick D, Tolin DF, Anticevic A, Pearlson GD, Levy I, Harpaz-Rotem I, Pittenger C. J. Psychiatr. Res. 2018; 109: 202-213.

Affiliation

Department of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, 06510, USA; Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06510, USA; Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, 06510, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jpsychires.2018.11.029

PMID

30572276

Abstract

Anhedonia is a transdiagnostic construct that can occur independent of other symptoms of depression; its role in neuropsychiatric disorders that are not primarily affective, such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), hoarding disorder (HD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has received limited attention. This paper addresses this gap. First, the data revealed a positive contribution of anhedonia, beyond the effects of general depression, to symptom severity in OCD but not in HD or PTSD. Second, anhedonia was operationalized as a reduced sensitivity to rewards, which allowed employing the value based decision making framework to investigate effects of anhedonia on reward-related behavioral outcomes, such as increased risk aversion and increased difficulty of making value-based choices. Both self-report and behavior-based measures were used to characterize individual risk aversion: risk perception and risk-taking propensities (measured using the Domain Specific Risk Taking scale) and risk attitudes evaluated using a gambling task. Data revealed the positive theoretically predicted correlation between anhedonia and risk perception in OCD; effects on self-reported risk taking and behavior-based risk aversion were non-significant. The same relations were weaker in HD and absent in PTSD. Response time during a gambling task, an index of difficulty of making value-based choices, significantly correlated with anhedonia in individuals with OCD and individuals with HD, even after controlling for general depression, but not in individuals with PTSD. The results suggest a unique contribution of one aspect of anhedonia in obsessive-compulsive disorder and confirm the importance of investigating the role of anhedonia transdiagnostically beyond affective and psychotic disorders.

Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Language: en