Neural Sensitivity to Social and Monetary Reward in Depression: Clarifying General and Domain-Specific Deficits

Abstract

Reward dysfunction is thought to be play a critical role in the pathogenesis of depression. Multiple studies have linked depression to abnormal neural sensitivity to monetary rewards, but it remains unclear whether this reward dysfunction is generalizable to other rewards types. The current study begins to address this gap by assessing abnormal sensitivity to both monetary and social rewards in relation to depressive symptoms. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during two incentive delay tasks, one with monetary reward and one with social reward. Both tasks were administered within the same sample, enabling a direct comparison of reward types. ERPs elicited by social and nonsocial rewards were morphologically similar across several stages of processing: cue salience, outcome anticipation, early outcome evaluation, outcome salience. Moderation analyses showed depression was linked with a pattern of general deficits across social and monetary rewards, specifically for the stages of outcome anticipation (stimulus-preceding negativity) and outcome salience (feedback-P3); self-reported reward sensitivity was generally associated with early outcome evaluation (reward positivity). Regression analyses modeling task-specific variance, however, showed a unique association between depression and outcome salience for social rewards, controlling for monetary rewards. The findings from this study underscore the importance of assessing neural sensitivity to multiple reward types in depression, particularly social reward. Characterizing the profile of reward functioning in depression across reward types may help to link laboratory-based deficits to relatively global vs. focal difficulties in real-world functioning.

Neural and self‐reported reward responsiveness are associated with dispositional affectivity and emotion dysregulation in adolescents with evidence for convergent and incremental validity

“…Consistent with the aspect of reward responsiveness probed by these tasks, ERP indices of reward processing included the P2 (attention selection and salience detection), P3 (attention reallocation when task demands change or an update of task representations is needed), and FN/ FRN/ RewP, but, except for (Oumeziane et al., 2019), none assessed the Cue P3 or SPN and none assessed the Target P3. Regarding self‐report measures, across available studies, measures were either based on outdated conceptualizations of the RST‐P (De Pascalis et al., 2010; Lange et al., 2012; Van den Berg et al., 2011) or assessed reward responsiveness narrowly but not reinforcement sensitivity broadly (Bress & Hajcak, 2013; Kujawa et al., 2019; Oumeziane et al., 2019; Salim et al., 2015). Accordingly, assessment of convergent validity between ERP components reflecting initial responsiveness to reward attainment and reward anticipation and self‐report indices of reinforcement sensitivity (in keeping with most recent theoretical conceptualizations) in adolescents —fills an important gap in the literature.…”

“…In the remaining investigations, reward learning (and response to reward during learning) was probed in a double choice Go/No-Go task (De Pascalis et al, 2010), and reward expectation mismatch was probed in a choice task (Lange et al, 2012). Consistent with the aspect of reward responsiveness probed by these tasks, ERP indices of reward processing included the P2 (attention selection and salience detection), P3 (attention reallocation when task demands change or an update of task representations is needed), and FN/ FRN/ RewP, but, except for (Oumeziane et al, 2019), none assessed the Cue P3 or SPN and none assessed the Target P3. Regarding self-report measures, across available studies, measures were either based on outdated conceptualizations of the RST-P (De Pascalis et al, 2010;Lange et al, 2012;Van den Berg et al, 2011) or assessed reward responsiveness narrowly but not reinforcement sensitivity broadly (Bress & Hajcak, 2013;Kujawa et al, 2019;Oumeziane et al, 2019;Salim et al, 2015).…”

“…The available literature on convergent validity between neural and self-report indices of reward responsiveness is comprised of seven studies that we could identify; of these, only one was conducted with children (Kujawa et al, 2019), the rest with adults, and none with adolescents. Initial responsiveness to reward attainment was probed in three studies via the Doors task (Bress & Hajcak, 2013;Kujawa et al, 2019;Van den Berg et al, 2011), initial responsiveness to reward attainment-though to (predicted and unpredicted) reward attainment (and omission)-was probed in another study via a passive gambling task (Salim et al, 2015) and reward anticipation was probed in only one study (via the MID task; Oumeziane et al, 2019). In the remaining investigations, reward learning (and response to reward during learning) was probed in a double choice Go/No-Go task (De Pascalis et al, 2010), and reward expectation mismatch was probed in a choice task (Lange et al, 2012).…”

“…As our hypothesis for (1) is based on mixed prior findings (Bress & Hajcak, 2013;Kujawa et al, 2019;Lange et al, 2012;Oumeziane et al, 2019;Salim et al, 2015;Van den Berg et al, 2011), we expected that some but not overwhelming evidence would be obtained in support of convergent validity, including, for example, in terms of a positive association between P3 to both monetary gain and loss and self-report reward responsiveness (Van den Berg et al, 2011) and a positive association between RewP to gain and selfreport reward responsiveness (Bress & Hajcak, 2013) and a negative association between RewP to gain and BIS sensitivity (Lange et al, 2012). Regarding 2, we specifically expected that neural reward responsiveness would predict self-report dispositional PA but in the absence of sufficient prior data, we did not have specific hypotheses about the relation between neural reward responsiveness and dispositional NA or between neural reward responsiveness and specific indices of ED.…”

Neural dynamics of monetary and social reward processing in social anhedonia

“…Using healthy samples, recent ERP studies have demonstrated that monetary and social rewards elicit morphologically similar ERPs during both the anticipatory and consummatory phases of reward processing. Specifically, whereas the SPN and the fb-P3 were found to be enhanced for monetary rewards than social rewards, the RewP seemed to be comparable across reward types ( Ait Oumeziane et al , 2017 ; Distefano et al , 2018 ; Ait Oumeziane et al , 2019 ; but see Ethridge and Weinberg, 2018 ). To our knowledge, only one previous study using a reversal learning task found that the RewP in response to monetary rewards was unaffected by social anhedonia as determined by the Revised Chapman Social Anhedonia Scale (RSAS; Karcher et al , 2017 ).…”