ArticleSchizophrenia bulletin2025
Blunted Ventral Striatal Reactivity to Social Reward Is Associated with More Severe Motivation and Pleasure Deficits in Psychosis.
Article in Schizophrenia bulletin, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Translational pathways of oxytocin therapy in schizophrenia: bridging negative symptom domains and neural mechanisms.Translational psychiatry · 2026Review
- Neural Correlates of Reward Processing: Impact of Individual Differences in Preference for Prosocial Interactions.Brain and behavior · 2025Article
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Abstract
background and hypothesisAmong individuals living with psychotic disorders, social impairment is common, debilitating, and challenging to treat. While the roots of this impairment are undoubtedly complex, converging lines of evidence suggest that social motivation and pleasure (MAP) deficits play a central role. Yet most neuroimaging studies have focused on monetary rewards, precluding decisive inferences. STUDY
designHere we leveraged parallel social and monetary incentive delay functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigms to test whether blunted reactivity to social incentives in the ventral striatum-a key component of the distributed neural circuit mediating appetitive motivation and hedonic pleasure-is associated with more severe MAP symptoms in a transdiagnostic adult sample enriched for psychosis. To maximize ecological validity and translational relevance, we capitalized on naturalistic audiovisual clips of an established social partner expressing positive feedback. STUDY
resultsAlthough both paradigms robustly engaged the ventral striatum, only reactivity to social incentives was associated with clinician-rated MAP deficits. This association remained significant when controlling for other symptoms, binary diagnostic status, or striatal reactivity to monetary incentives. Follow-up analyses suggested that this association predominantly reflects diminished activation during the presentation of social reward.
conclusionsThese observations provide a neurobiologically grounded framework for conceptualizing the social-anhedonia symptoms and social impairments that characterize many individuals living with psychotic disorders and underscore the need to develop targeted intervention strategies.
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