No abstract

Anhedonia - diminished pleasure and/or decreased reactivity to pleasurable stimuli - is a core feature of depression that frequently persists after treatment. As a result, extensive effort has been directed towards characterizing the psychological and biological processes that mediate dysfunctional reward processing in depression. Reward processing can be parsed into sub-components that include motivation, reinforcement learning, and hedonic capacity, which, according to preclinical and neuroimaging evidence, involve partially dissociable brain systems. In line with this, recent findings indicate that behavioral impairments and neural abnormalities in depression vary across distinct reward-related constructs. Ultimately, improved understanding of precise reward-related dysfunctions in depression promises to improve diagnostic and therapeutic efforts in depression.

Variations in people's vulnerability to stressful life events may rise from a predated neural sensitivity as well as from differential neural modifications in response to the event. Because the occurrence of a stressful life event cannot be foreseen, characterizing the temporal trajectory of its neural manifestations in humans has been a real challenge. The current prospective study examined the emotional experience and brain responses of 50 a priori healthy new recruits to the Israeli Defense Forces at 2 time points: before they entered their mandatory military service and after their subsequent exposure to stressful events while deployed in combat units. Over time, soldiers reported on increase in stress symptoms that was correlated with greater amygdala and hippocampus responsiveness to stress-related content. However, these closely situated core limbic regions exhibited different temporal trajectories with regard to the stress effect; whereas amygdala's reactivity before stress predicted the increase in stress symptoms, the hippocampal change in activation over time correlated with the increase in such symptoms. Hippocampal plasticity was also reflected by a modification over time of its functional coupling with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and this coupling magnitude was again predicted by predated amygdala reactivity. Together, these findings suggest that variations in human's likelihood to develop symptomatic phenomena following stressful life events may depend on a balanced interplay between their amygdala's predisposing reactivity and hippocampal posteriori intra-and interregional plasticity. Accordingly, an individually tailored therapeutic approach for trauma survivors should target these 2 neural probes while considering their unique temporal prints.individual differences ͉ prospective study ͉ fMRI ͉ trauma