Anhedonia has been implicated as a core symptom of depression and schizophrenia, and studying anhedonia has yielded a wide array of important findings aiding the understanding and identification of psychological disorders. However, anhedonia is a complex and multifaceted construct; indeed, the term anhedonia has been defined in psychological and psychiatric research as many different concepts, a number of which are theoretically and methodologically independent of one another. In this review alone, we discuss research that separates social aspects of anhedonia from the physical contexts of anhedonia, with the former emphasizing interpersonal relationships as important to anhedonic symptoms, and the latter emphasizing biological and brain-related impairment as potential causes of chronic anhedonia states. We highlight research that distinguishes between interest in (wanting) or experience of (liking) potential pleasure as definitions of anhedonia and also disambiguate methodologically and theoretically distinct ways of assessing 1) trait-level dispositional tendencies, 2) state-level cross-sectional assessments, and 3) symptom-based recent changes from baseline, all of which have been used to indicate anhedonia. Lastly, we describe cutting-edge translations of basic anhedonia research into treatment and discuss how different conceptualizations of anhedonia, guided by recent theoretical and methodological advances, have begun to usher in a science of anhedonia that is consistent with increasingly personalized assessment and treatment. We conclude with a note for future research, emphasizing that continued application of theoretically based operationalizations of anhedonia and sound design are paramount to continue the recent progress toward meaningful and specific use of the anhedonia construct in clinical research.

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Objectives Reward devaluation theory (RDT) posits that some depressed individuals avoid positivity due to its previous association with negative outcomes. Behavioral indicators of avoidance of reward support RDT, but self‐report indicators have yet to be examined discriminantly. Two candidate self‐report measures were examined in relation to depression: negative affect interference (NAI), or the experience of negative affect in response to positivity, and fear of happiness, a fear of prospective happiness. Method Participants completed measures assessing NAI, fear of happiness scale, and depression online via Amazon's Mechanical Turk at three time points (N = 375). Multilevel modeling examined the relationship between NAI, fear of happiness, and depressive symptoms longitudinally. Results NAI and fear of happiness were both positively associated with depressive symptoms. They both uniquely predicted depressive symptoms when included within the same model. Conclusions These findings suggest that different conceptualizations of positivity avoidance are uniquely associated with depressive symptoms.

Objective: Components of rumination, including brooding and reflection, as well as devaluating prospective positivity, may help maintain depressive symptoms. We examined these components together for the first time using network analysis. Methods: We examined the robustness of rumination communities of closely related items in one network and then examined the interrelationships between rumination communities, devaluation of positivity, and depression, in a second network. Results: Three rumination communities emerged, replicating findings of Bernstein et al. (2019). Within a dense network, nodes representing brooding, reflective pondering, and difficulty trusting positive feelings were most influential. In addition, the node representing the depressive symptom negative self-views shared strong edges with nodes representing devaluation of positivity and brooding. Conclusion: Brooding, reflective pondering, and elements of devaluing positivity are influential to depressive symptoms and may be important future experimental and therapeutic targets. Depressed individuals with negative self-views may engage in brooding and devalue their experience of positivity.

Reward Devaluation Theory posits that depressed individuals avoid and devalue positivity, suggesting that they may be less likely to hold positive self-schemas. Previous meta-analytic reviews support this theoretical framework with regard to positivity but have not assessed for self-referential stimuli. Self-referential encoding and recall tasks assess for self-schemas and thus provide further insight into how depressed individuals process self-referential positivity. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was thus to examine the extent to which depressed individuals differ in processing self-referential positivity and negativity, and whether this processing differs when depressed individuals think of others (i.e., other-referential). Results indicate that depressed individuals recall and endorse fewer self-referential positive than negative words, and fewer self-referential than other-referential positive words, than nondepressed individuals. These findings fall squarely in line with Reward Devaluation Theory and suggest that conceptualizing self-referential processing in depression as merely based on negativity biases can overlook crucial information about how depressed individuals devalue positive information that is self-relevant. We then conclude with a discussion of the implications for the conceptualization and treatment of depression.