Background
Anhedonia, a reduced ability to experience pleasure, is a chief symptom of major depressive
disorder and is related to reduced frontostriatal connectivity when attempting to
upregulate positive emotion. The present study examined another facet of positive
emotion regulation associated with anhedonia—namely, the downregulation of positive
affect—and its relation to prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity.
Methods
Neuroimaging data were collected from 27 individuals meeting criteria for major depressive
disorder as they attempted to suppress positive emotion during a positive emotion
regulation task. Their PFC activation pattern was compared with the PFC activation
pattern exhibited by 19 healthy control subjects during the same task. Anhedonia scores
were collected at three time points: at baseline (time 1), 8 weeks after time 1 (i.e.,
time 2), and 6 months after time 1 (i.e., time 3). Prefrontal cortex activity at time
1 was used to predict change in anhedonia over time. Analyses were conducted utilizing
hierarchical linear modeling software.
Results
Depressed individuals who could not inhibit positive emotion—evinced by reduced right
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex activity during attempts to dampen their experience
of positive emotion in response to positive visual stimuli—exhibited a steeper anhedonia
reduction slope between baseline and 8 weeks of treatment with antidepressant medication
(p < .05). Control subjects showed a similar trend between baseline and time 3.
Conclusions
To reduce anhedonia, it may be necessary to teach individuals how to counteract the
functioning of an overactive pleasure-dampening prefrontal inhibitory system.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: August 26, 2011
Accepted:
June 29,
2011
Received in revised form:
June 28,
2011
Received:
January 11,
2011
Identification
Copyright
© 2011 Society of Biological Psychiatry. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
ScienceDirect
Access this article on ScienceDirectLinked Article
- Regulation of Emotion in Major Depressive DisorderBiological PsychiatryVol. 70Issue 10
- PreviewThe ability to regulate emotion is central to everyday functioning and has been studied extensively in healthy adults in the last two decades. One conclusion supported by this research is that various cognitive strategies can be used to effectively regulate both positive and negative emotion (which is consistent with a wealth of clinical work on the efficacy of cognitive therapy). More recently, basic neuroimaging work using now-well-established experimental paradigms has increased our understanding of the neural systems involved in the cognitive regulation of emotion.
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