Anhedonia is characterized by a reduced capacity to experience pleasure in response to rewarding stimuli and has been considered a possible candidate endophenotype in depression and schizophrenia. However, it is still not well understood whether these reward deficits are confined to anticipatory and/or to consummatory experiences of pleasure. In the present study, we recorded electrophysiological responses (event-related brain potentials [ERPs] and oscillatory activity) to monetary gains and losses in extreme groups of anhedonic and nonanhedonic participants. The anhedonic participants showed reduced motivation to incur risky decisions, especially after monetary rewards. These sequential behavioral effects were correlated with an increased sensitivity to punishment, which psychometrically characterized the anhedonic group. In contrast, both electrophysiological measures associated with the impacts of monetary losses and gains-the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the beta-gamma oscillatory componentclearly revealed preserved consummatory responses in anhedonic participants. However, anhedonics showed a drastic increase in frontal medial theta power after receiving the maximum monetary gain. This increase in theta oscillatory activity could be associated with an increase in conflict and cognitive control for unexpected large positive rewards, thus indexing the violation of default negative expectations built up across the task in anhedonic participants. Thus, the present results showed that participants with elevated scores on Chapman's Physical Anhedonia Scale were more sensitive to possible punishments, showed deficits in the correct integration of response outcomes in their actions, and evidenced deficits in sustaining positive expectations of future rewards. This overall pattern suggests an effect of anhedonia in the motivational aspects of approach behavior rather than in consummatory processes.Keywords Anhedonia . Reward processing . Feedbackrelated Negativity . Medial-frontal theta oscillatory activity . Beta-gamma oscillatory activity . Motivation Recent years have shown a renewed interest in the study of affective processes, and particularly in the psychological and neural mechanisms that explain the interaction between goal-directed behavior, reward, and motivation. One of the most important aspects that has been somehow neglected, yet is crucial to understanding motivated behavior, is individual differences in anhedonia. The concept of "anhedonia" refers to a reduction of the ability to experience pleasure (Meehl, 1975), as reflected in a diminished interest in rewarding stimuli and pleasurable events. Anhedonia has been described as a prominent symptom and potential trait marker of major depression (Loas, 1996) and is broadly studied in relation to schizophrenia and the negative-
Anhedonia is the diminished motivation and sensitivity to pleasurable stimuli. It has been reported to be more prevalent in patients with chronic pain as compared to healthy controls. Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory systemic disease with a significant psychosocial impact that compromises wellbeing and the day-to-day life of patients. Women with endometriosis show significant psychological distress, even more pervasive when chronic pelvic pain is present. In the current review we will discuss the role of anhedonia in endometriotic chronic pelvic pain. We will also present new lines of research that could lead to more fully clarifying the psychological impact of endometriosis and its detrimental repercussions to quality of life and mental health.
When interacting in error-prone environments, humans display different tolerances to changing their decisions when faced with erroneous feedback information. Here, we investigated whether these individual differences in error tolerance (ET) were reflected in neurophysiological mechanisms indexing specific motivational states related to feedback monitoring. To explore differences in ET, we examined the performance of 80 participants in a probabilistic reversal-learning task. We then compared eventrelated brain responses (ERPs) of two extreme groups of participants (High ET and Low ET), which showed radical differences in their propensity to maintain newly learned rules after receiving spurious negative feedback. We observed that High ET participants showed reduced anticipatory activity prior to the presentation of incoming feedback, informing them of the correctness of their performance. This was evidenced by measuring the amplitude of the stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN), an ERP component indexing attention and motivational engagement of incoming informative feedback. Postfeedback processing ERP components (the so-called Feedback-Related Negativity and the P300) also showed reduced amplitude in this group (High ET). The general decreased responsiveness of the High ET group to external feedback suggests a higher proneness to favor internal(rule)-based strategies, reducing attention to external cues and the consequent impact of negative evaluations on decision making. We believe that the present findings support the existence of specific cognitive and motivational processes underlying individual differences on error-tolerance among humans, contributing to the ongoing research focused on understanding the mental processes behind human fallibility in error-prone scenarios.Keywords Error tolerance . Decision-making . Action-monitoring . ERPs . Individual differences Humans have different tolerance to negative feedback about their performance and changing their ongoing behaviors based on external environmental cues. As these individual differences are likely to influence the way their decisions are acted upon, an important challenge for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists is not only to understand the nature of the brain mechanisms and inherent cognitive and motivational processes underlying these differences but also to explain how these differences are related to (in)adequate decisional processes carried out by human agents in their interaction with real-world and error-prone environments.The study of human error processing has advanced enormously during the last 2 decades, mostly due to the discovery of specific event-related brain components (ERPs) and neural networks that respond selectively to error monitoring, error correction, and compensation processes (Carter et al., 1998;
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