ArticlePsychological medicine2019
From laboratory to life: associating brain reward processing with real-life motivated behaviour and symptoms of depression in non-help-seeking young adults.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 64 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neuroscience meets behavior: A systematic literature review on magnetic resonance imaging of the brain combined with real-world digital phenotyping.Human brain mapping · 2024Pooled it
- Great Expectations: A Critical Review of and Suggestions for the Study of Reward Processing as a Cause and Predictor of Depression.Biological psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Negative symptoms and resting state functional connectivity: Leveraging ecological momentary assessment and individual-specific techniques.Schizophrenia research · 2026Article
- Born to act: Deferred action and desire as active inference.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Review
- Sex differences in externalizing and internalizing traits and ventral striatal responses to monetary loss.Journal of psychiatric research · 2023Article
- Neural, behavioural and real-life correlates of social context sensitivity and social reward learning during interpersonal interactions in the schizophrenia spectrum.The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry · 2022Article
- Differential reinforcement learning responses to positive and negative information in unmedicated individuals with depression.European neuropsychopharmacology : the journal of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021Article
- Reward Responsiveness in Patients with Opioid Use Disorder on Opioid Agonist Treatment: Role of Comorbid Chronic Pain.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2021Article
- [Positive cognitive neuroscience : Positive valence systems of the Research Domain Criteria initiative].Der Nervenarzt · 2021Review
- Prospective Mental Imagery in Depression: Impact on Reward Processing and Reward-Motivated Behaviour.Clinical psychology in Europe · 2021Article
- Perseverative Cognition in the Positive Valence Systems: An Experimental and Ecological Investigation.Brain sciences · 2021Article
- Revisiting the importance of model fitting for model-based fMRI: It does matter in computational psychiatry.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Increased Reward-Related Activation in the Ventral Striatum During Stress Exposure Associated With Positive Affect in the Daily Life of Young Adults With a Family History of Depression. Preliminary Findings.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Article
- From neuroimaging to daily functioning: A multimethod analysis of reward anticipation in people with schizophrenia.Journal of abnormal psychology · 2019Article
- Depression genetic risk score is associated with anhedonia-related markers across units of analysis.Translational psychiatry · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundDepression has been associated with abnormalities in neural underpinnings of Reward Learning (RL). However, inconsistencies have emerged, possibly owing to medication effects. Additionally, it remains unclear how neural RL signals relate to real-life behaviour. The current study, therefore, examined neural RL signals in young, mildly to moderately depressed - but non-help-seeking and unmedicated - individuals and how these signals are associated with depressive symptoms and real-life motivated behaviour.
methodsIndividuals with symptoms along the depression continuum (n = 87) were recruited from the community. They performed an RL task during functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and were assessed with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), completing short questionnaires on emotions and behaviours up to 10 times/day for 15 days. Q-learning model-derived Reward Prediction Errors (RPEs) were examined in striatal areas, and subsequently associated with depressive symptoms and an ESM measure capturing (non-linearly) how anticipation of reward experience corresponds to actual reward experience later on.
resultsSignificant RPE signals were found in the striatum, insula, amygdala, hippocampus, frontal and occipital cortices. Region-of-interest analyses revealed a significant association between RPE signals and (a) self-reported depressive symptoms in the right nucleus accumbens (b = -0.017, p = 0.006) and putamen (b = -0.013, p = .012); and (b) the quadratic ESM variable in the left (b = 0.010, p = .010) and right (b = 0.026, p = 0.011) nucleus accumbens and right putamen (b = 0.047, p < 0.001).
conclusionsStriatal RPE signals are disrupted along the depression continuum. Moreover, they are associated with reward-related behaviour in real-life, suggesting that real-life coupling of reward anticipation and engagement in rewarding activities might be a relevant target of psychological therapies for depression.
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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.