ArticleJournal of affective disorders2023
Amygdala and nucleus accumbens activation during reward anticipation moderates the association between life stressor frequency and depressive symptoms.
Article in Journal of affective disorders, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nucleus Accumbens D1 Receptor Neurons Contribute to Emotional and Metabolic Adaptation to Chronic Hypoxia.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- Executive Dysfunction and Depression Risk in Adolescence: Functional-MRI Analysis of Transient Network States During a Working Memory Task.Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2026Article
- Prefrontal cortex development and its implications in mental illness.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- Neurocognitive Biotypes of Risk and Resilience for Mood Disorders in Adolescents: Insights From Behavioral and Graph-Theoretic Network Markers.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2025Article
- Investigating Neural Reward Sensitivity in the School Grade Incentive Delay Task and Its Relation to Academic Buoyancy.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Value-Directed Remembering: A Dual-Process Perspective.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Value-based cognitive control moderates the relation of inflammation with depression in adolescents.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making in Depression in Adolescents and Young Adults: Insights from a New Model of the Probabilistic Reward Task.Computational psychiatry (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Brain alteration of PCOS: neuroimaging and function.Frontiers in neurologyReview
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
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Abstract
backgroundLife stressors confer risk for depressive symptoms, but individuals vary in the extent of their sensitivity to life stressors. One protective factor may be an individual's level of reward sensitivity, e.g., a stronger neurobiological response to environmental rewards may mitigate emotional responses to stressors. However, the nature of neurobiological reward sensitivity that corresponds with stress resilience is unknown. Further, this model is untested in adolescence, when life stressor frequency and depression increase.
methodsWe tested the hypothesis that stronger reward-related activation in the left and right nucleus accumbens (NAc), amygdala, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) attenuates the strength of the stress-depression relation. We measured BOLD activation throughout Win and Lose blocks of a monetary reward task, as well as during anticipation and outcome phases of the task. Participants (N = 151, ages 13-19) were recruited to be stratified on risk for mood disorders to enhance variance in depressive symptoms.
resultsActivation during anticipation of rewards in the bilateral amygdala and NAc, but not mPFC, buffered the association between life stressors and depressive symptoms. This buffering effect was not found for reward outcome activation or activation across Win blocks.
conclusionsResults highlight the importance of reward anticipation activation of subcortical structures in attenuating the stress-depression link, suggesting that reward motivation may be a cognitive mechanism through which this stress buffering occurs.
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