Worth the ‘EEfRT’? The Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task as an Objective Measure of Motivation and Anhedonia

By Michael T. Treadway, Joshua W. Buckholtz, Ashley N. Schwartzman, Warren E. Lambert, David H. Zald. PLoS ONE, 2009

733 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Of the putative psychopathological endophenotypes in major depressive disorder (MDD), the anhedonic subtype is particularly well supported. Anhedonia is generally assumed to reflect aberrant motivation and reward responsivity. However, research has been limited by a lack of objective measures of reward motivation. We present the Effort-Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT or “effort”), a novel behavioral paradigm as a means of exploring effort-based decision-making in humans. Using the EEfRT, we test the hypothesis that effort-based decision-making is related to trait anhedonia. Methods/Results 61 undergraduate students participated in the experiment. Subjects completed self-report measures of mood and trait anhedonia, and completed the EEfRT. Across multiple analyses, we found a significant inverse relationship between anhedonia and willingness to expend effort for rewards. Conclusions These findings suggest that anhedonia is specifically associated with decreased motivation for rewards, and provide initial validation for the EEfRT as a laboratory-based behavioral measure of reward motivation and effort-based decision-making in humans.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/232d5a5a99021a4fc936a660d4159e8d6be7d3f4

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. David H. Zald
2. Michael T. Treadway

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Morten L. Kringelbach
2. Gustavo Deco
3. Michael T. Treadway
4. David H. Zald
5. Andre Der-Avakian
6. A. Markou
7. E. T. Rolls
8. Kent C. Berridge

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Morten L. Kringelbach
2. Michael T. Treadway
3. Gustavo Deco
4. David H. Zald
5. Andre Der-Avakian
6. A. Markou
7. Kent C. Berridge
8. B. de Gelder

Citations in the corpus

• Great Expectations: Using Whole-Brain Computational Connectomics for Understanding Neuropsychiatric Disorders (2014, background): “biomarkers that stratify a broad-illness phenotype into a finite number of treatment-relevant subgroups (Trusheim et al., 2007).”
• The Neurobiology of Anhedonia and Other Reward-Related Deficits (2011, methodology): “Two excellent examples are from the laboratories of Pizzagalli [101] and Zald [102], both of whom developed objective, laboratory-based procedures that are used to detect the influence of reinforcement history and motivation, respectively, in human subjects (Box 1).”
• Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder: A Translational Model of Motivational Anhedonia (2012, unknown): “This approach replicates prior analytical methods using the EEfRT (Treadway et al., 2009; Wardle et al., 2011; Treadway et al., 2012).”
• Reconsidering Anhedonia in Depression: Lessons from Translational Neuroscience (2010, background): “…(HPA) Axis in MDD, it has been demonstrated that individuals with depression and early life-trauma exhibit structural reductions in regions involved in HPA axis regulation, while individuals with depression but not early-life trauma do not (Treadway et al., 2009b; Vythilingam et al., 2002).”