Effort-Based Decision-Making in Major Depressive Disorder: A Translational Model of Motivational Anhedonia

By Michael T. Treadway, Nicholas A. Bossaller, R. Shelton, David H. Zald. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 2012

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Anhedonia is a core feature of major depressive disorder (MDD), but the precise nature of anhedonic symptoms is unknown. While anhedonia has traditionally been viewed as a deficit in the experience of pleasure, more recent evidence suggests that reduced anticipation and motivation may also be a core feature of this symptom. Here, we provide data from a study in MDD patients and healthy controls using a translational measure of reward motivation, the Effort Expenditure for Rewards Task (EEfRT or “effort”). This task offers subjects a series of trials where they may choose to expend more or less effort for the opportunity to win varying amounts of monetary rewards. We found that MDD patients were less willing to expend effort for rewards than controls. Additionally, we observed that patients were less able to effectively use reward information about magnitude and probability of rewards to guide their choice behavior. Finally, within the MDD patient group, duration of the current episode was a significant negative predictor of EEfRT task performance. These findings offer novel support for theoretical models proposing that anhedonia in MDD may reflect specific impairments in motivation and reward-based decision-making.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb03b1cd640d193507cc83237178eca69a99af3f

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Citations in the corpus

Motivation and cognitive control: from behavior to neural mechanism. (2015, background): “…Somerville & Casey 2010, Westbrook et al. 2013) and/or clinical profile (Barch et al. 2008, Slusarek et al. 2001, Strand et al. 2012, Strauss et al. 2013, Treadway et al. 2012). and (b) its intensity, the strength of its top-down input to those systems (Bonner & Sprinkle 2002, Shenhav et al. 2013).”
What Predicts Positive Life Events that Influence the Course of Depression? A Longitudinal Examination of Gratitude and Meaning in Life (2017, background): “Motivational anhedonia in clinical depression may be so overwhelming that personality strengths are not able to facilitate behavior activation (Treadway et al. 2012).”
Depression, Stress, and Anhedonia: Toward a Synthesis and Integrated Model (2014, background): “Finally, subjects with MDD were less willing than controls to expend effort in order to receive high monetary rewards (Treadway et al. 2012).”