Anhedonia and the Affectively Scaffolded Mind

Abstract

King's College London, UK Anhedonia, roughly defined as the diminishment or absence of the capacity to experience pleasure or joy in the performance of daily activities, is a core symptom of Major Depressive Disorder, as well as other psychiatric illnesses. I argue that the two major psychological theories of anhedonia are committed to the view that anhedonia depends, in the general case, on more than just neurobiological states and processes. This is despite the overwhelming explanatory focus on neurobiological factors in the existing literature, which reflects a general commitment to biomedical materialism, the view that mental illnesses are simply neural dysfunctions (Davies 2016; Zachar 2000). Instead, I argue that anhedonia depends upon the breakdown in the function of what Colombetti and Krueger (2015) term a subject's affective niche. Since affective niches are composed of elements of a person's natural and social environments, including artefacts, activities, and other people, anhedonia likewise turns out to depend on a subject's environment, in a manner that makes it generally inscrutable within the boundaries of skin and skull. I discuss and refute some objections to this view, and conclude by sketching a promising, general strategy one could adopt to refute biomedical materialism for a non-trivial class of other psychiatric symptoms. 1. Specifically, the nucleus accumbens and frontostriatal network.