ArticleBrain sciences2020
Pupil Dilation during Reward Anticipation Is Correlated to Depressive Symptom Load in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder.
Article in Brain sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Protocol of the randomized double blind sham controlled AddVNS study of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation mechanisms in depression.Scientific reports · 2026Trial
- The Pupil-Brain System at Rest: Spontaneous Pupil Fluctuations as Markers of Neuromodulatory and Network Dynamics.Psychophysiology · 2026Review
- Arousal shapes motivation: an integrative framework for understanding motivational deficits.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- α -tACS Modulates Reward-Dependent Pupil Responses and Corticostriatal Connectivity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Increasing resilience to stress by home-based transcranial stimulation.Research square · 2025Article
- Corticostriatal responses to social reward are linked to trait reward sensitivity and subclinical substance use in young adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Free-viewing gaze patterns reveal a mood-congruency bias in MDD during an affective fMRI/eye-tracking task.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2024Observational
- Corticostriatal Responses to Social Reward are Linked to Trait Reward Sensitivity and Subclinical Substance Use in Young Adults.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Transdiagnostic inflexible learning dynamics explain deficits in depression and schizophrenia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2024Article
- Assessing hypo-arousal during reward anticipation with pupillometry in patients with major depressive disorder: replication and correlations with anhedonia.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Are depressive symptoms linked to a reduced pupillary response to novel positive information?-An eye tracking proof-of-concept study.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Uncovering the Neural Correlates of Anhedonia Subtypes in Major Depressive Disorder: Implications for Intervention Strategies.Biomedicines · 2023Article
- Pupillometry tracks cognitive load and salience network activity in a working memory functional magnetic resonance imaging task.Human brain mapping · 2022Article
- PupilEXT: Flexible Open-Source Platform for High-Resolution Pupillometry in Vision Research.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Depression is a debilitating disorder with high prevalence and socioeconomic cost, but the brain-physiological processes that are altered during depressive states are not well understood. Here, we build on recent findings in macaques that indicate a direct causal relationship between pupil dilation and anterior cingulate cortex mediated arousal during anticipation of reward. We translated these findings to human subjects with concomitant pupillometry/fMRI in a sample of unmedicated participants diagnosed with major depression and healthy controls. We could show that the upregulation and maintenance of arousal in anticipation of reward was disrupted in patients in a symptom-load dependent manner. We could further show that the failure to maintain reward anticipatory arousal showed state-marker properties, as it tracked the load and impact of depressive symptoms independent of prior diagnosis status. Further, group differences of anticipatory arousal and continuous correlations with symptom load were not traceable only at the level of pupillometric responses, but were mirrored also at the neural level within salience network hubs. The upregulation and maintenance of arousal during reward anticipation is a novel translational and well-traceable process that could prove a promising gateway to a physiologically informed patient stratification and targeted interventions.
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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.