As a cardinal feature of several psychiatric disorders, anhedonia includes a consummatory component (deficits in hedonic response to rewards) and an anticipatory component (a reduced motivation to pursue them). Although being conceptualized as impairments of reward system, the neural characterization of reward processing in anhedonia is hampered by the enormous heterogeneity in the reward phase (‘wanting’ vs ‘liking’) and comorbidity (inherent to disease states). The current event-related potential (ERP) study examined the reward dynamics of anticipatory anhedonia in a non-clinical sample. Anticipatory and consummatory ERP components were assessed with a monetary incentive delay task in a high anticipatory anhedonia (HAA) group and a low anticipatory anhedonia (LAA) group. HAA vs LAA group showed a diminished reward-related speeding during behavioral performance and reported overall reduced positive affect during anticipation and receipt of outcomes. Importantly, neural dynamics underlying reward processing were negatively associated with anticipatory anhedonia across the anticipatory phase indexed by the contingent negative variation and the consummatory phase indexed by the feedback P3. Our results suggest that anticipatory anhedonia in non-clinical individuals is linked to a poor modulation during both anticipatory and consummatory phases of reward processing.

Being characterized by reduced pleasure from social interaction, social anhedonia constitutes a transdiagnostic marker for various psychiatric disorders. However, the neural portrait of social anhedonia remains elusive because of heterogeneities of reward type and reward dynamics in previous studies. The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated neural dynamics in response to monetary and social rewards in social anhedonia. ERP responses were examined when a high social anhedonia (HSA, N = 23) group and a low social anhedonia (LSA, N = 26) group were anticipating and consuming social and monetary rewards. During the anticipatory phase, the stimulus-preceding negativity was increased for monetary compared to social rewards in the LSA group but not the HSA group. During the consummatory phase, the reward positivity was increased for monetary relative to social rewards, which was found for the LSA group but not the HSA group. These results could result from an increased relevance of social rewards or a general decline in affective responding due to a potential association between social anhedonia and depression. Our findings provide preliminary evidence for neural aberrations of the reward system in social anhedonia, which is contingent upon reward type and reward dynamics.

The current event-related potential study investigated the perceptual processing of the categorization advantage of happy over sad faces in social anhedonia with a nonclinical sample. A high social anhedonia (HSA, N = 25) group and a low social anhedonia (LSA, N = 27) group performed a facial expression categorization task during which they classified facial expressions (happy, neutral, sad), irrespective of face orientation (upright, upside-down). Behaviorally, happy faces were identified more quickly than sad ones in the upright but not inverted orientation. Electrophysiologically, the LSA group showed earlier N170 latencies for happy than for sad faces in the upright but not upside-down orientation, whereas the HSA group did not show any expression effect on N170 latencies. Moreover, N170 and P2 amplitude results revealed that HSA relative to LSA individuals showed delayed neural discrimination between happy and sad faces. These results suggest that social anhedonia is associated with a deficit of perceptual processing during facial expression categorization.