Social anhedonia and aggressive behavior

Anhedonia and the Relationship Between Other Depressive Symptoms and Aggressive Behavior

“…Studies examining anhedonia and aggression have produced some inconsistent results. For instance, anhedonia has been found to predict aggression on a behavioral task; however, in the same investigation, anhedonia and self-reported aggression did not yield a similar relationship (Fanning et al, 2012). Thus, further research is needed to clarify the nature of the relationship between anhedonia and aggression.…”

“…In the present pair of studies, we focus on anhedonia, or the loss of pleasure or interest in people or things. Anhedonia is a core element of depression that may be uniquely associated with aggressive and antisocial behavior including sexual violence (Carvalho & Nobre, 2013), delinquency in adolescents (Cohn et al, 2015), and aggression in a laboratory task (Fanning, Berman, & Guillot, 2012). Anhedonia may also help explain the relationship between self-directed aggression 1 and depression (Fawcett et al, 1990;Nordström, Schalling, & Asberg, 1995;Sadeh, Javdani, Finy, & Verona, 2011).…”

“…In the present study, we used measures of aggression and antisocial behaviors previously used to investigate candidate relationships with anhedonia (Fanning et al, 2012). We also employed a novel measure of anhedonia, the Specific Loss of Interest and Pleasure Scale (SLIPS; Winer, Veilleux, & Ginger, 2014), which allows for the assessment of recent changes in anhedonia separately from trait anhedonia and therefore offers an incremental advance for examining acute loss of interest and pleasure associated with depression.…”

“…Finding a link between self-reported changes in anhedonia and aggressive and antisocial behavior in college students would be important for a number of reasons. First, social anhedonia may reflect interpersonal dysfunction and proneness to psychopathology (S. M. Thompson et al, 2015), as well as increase the chance that an individual may become aggressive (Fanning et al, 2012). Second, discovering that anhedonia underlies the relationship between depression and aggressive or antisocial acts would help specify one way that depression and aggression are linked.…”

“…The BPAQ has previously evidenced adequate reliability, and in the present study we used the anger and hostility subscales, for which reliability was acceptable (anger: α = .82; hostility: α = .86). Trait anger and hostility were included as covariates in our regression models, replicating previous analytic methods (Fanning et al, 2012).…”