ArticleJournal of affective disorders2016
Anhedonia is associated with blunted reward sensitivity in first-degree relatives of patients with major depression.
Article in Journal of affective disorders, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 71 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cognitive Performance in First-Degree Relatives of Individuals With vs Without Major Depressive Disorder: A Meta-analysis.JAMA psychiatry · 2019Pooled it
- Consummatory deficits in close social reward predict inflammation-induced depressed mood.Psychoneuroendocrinology · 2026Trial
- Dissecting the impact of depression on decision-making.Psychological medicine · 2020Trial
- Probing biomarkers and clinical utility of reward learning across species using the Probabilistic Reward Task: 20 years of findings.Nature. Mental health · 2026Article
- Anhedonia and altered reward responsiveness: Relations to psychosocial functioning.Journal of mood and anxiety disorders · 2026Article
- From Neural Circuits to Behavior: Examining the Central Role of Anhedonia in Major Depression.Advances in experimental medicine and biology · 2026Review
- Distinct effects of monetary versus social reward magnitudes on the emotional congruency effect in subclinical depression: a word-face Stroop study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Anhedonia is associated with computational impairments in reward and effort learning in young people with depression symptoms.Psychological medicine · 2025Article
- Cross-species dissection of the modular role of the ventral tegmental area in depressive disorders.Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Family functioning and dysfunctional attitudes mediate the link between childhood maltreatment and nonsuicidal self-injury in depressed college students: a moderated mediation model of anhedonia.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Reviewing explore/exploit decision-making as a transdiagnostic target for psychosis, depression, and anxiety.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Review
- Social and non-social feedback stimuli lead to comparable levels of reward learning and reward responsiveness in an online probabilistic reward task.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Trajectories of Anhedonia Symptoms after Traumatic Injury.European journal of trauma & dissociation = Revue europeenne du trauma et de la dissociation · 2024Article
- Anhedonia in adolescents at transdiagnostic familial risk for severe mental illness: Clustering by symptoms and mechanisms of association with behavior.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Genetic Associations of Anhedonia: Insights into Overlap of Mental and Somatic Disorders.Consortium psychiatricum · 2024Article
- Using Drift Diffusion and RL Models to Disentangle Effects of Depression On Decision-Making vs. Learning in the Probabilistic Reward Task.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Stress to inflammation and anhedonia: Mechanistic insights from preclinical and clinical models.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Reward Behavior Disengagement, a Neuroeconomic Model-Based Objective Measure of Reward Pathology in Depression: Findings from the EMBARC Trial.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- History of major depressive disorder is associated with differences in implicit learning of emotional faces.Journal of psychiatric research · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundAnhedonia is a cardinal feature of major depression and is hypothesized to be driven by low motivation, in particular blunted reward sensitivity. It has been suggested to be a marker that represents a genetic predisposition to this disorder. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying this heightened risk in unaffected first-degree relatives of patients with major depression. We previously demonstrated abnormal reward biases in acutely depressed patients. The present study aimed to examine the development of reward bias in first-degree relatives of patients with major depression.
methodsForty-seven first-degree relatives of patients with major depression (26 females, age 18-52) and 60 healthy controls with no family history of depression (34 females, age 21-48) were recruited. A probabilistically rewarded difficult visual discrimination task, in which participants were instructed about the contingencies, was used to assess blunted reward sensitivity. A response bias towards the more frequently rewarded stimulus (termed "reward bias") was the primary outcome variable in this study. Participants also completed self-reported measures of anhedonia and depressive symptoms.
resultsCompared with the control group, relatives of patients with major depression with sub-clinical depressive symptoms displayed a blunted reward bias. Relatives without symptoms displayed largely intact motivational processing on both self-report and experimental measures. The degree of anhedonia was associated with attenuated reward bias in first-degree relatives of patients with major depression, especially in those with sub-clinical symptoms. LIMITATIONS: The study did not include a depressed patient group, which restricted our ability to interpret the observed group differences.
conclusionsBlunted reward sensitivity may be largely manifested in a subgroup of relatives with high levels of depressive symptoms.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.