Original ArticleNeural Responses to Monetary Incentives in Major Depression
Section snippets
Participants
Fourteen individuals (5 male) diagnosed with MDD but no other current Axis I Disorders with the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM (44) and 12 individuals (4 male) with no history of any Axis I disorder participated in the present study. All participants spoke fluent English and ranged in age from 18 to 48 years. Approximately one-half of the MDD participants were recruited from two outpatient university hospital psychiatry clinics, whereas the other one-half were self-referred from the
Participant Characteristics
As expected, MDD participants scored lower in general functioning and higher in depressive symptomatology than CTL participants (Table 1). Whereas the GAF scores of the MDD participants indicated the presence of serious symptoms and impairment, the GAF scores of the CTL participants reflected absent or minor symptoms. The MDD participants had a mean of four previous depressive episodes. The groups did not differ in terms of age, handedness, or vocabulary scores.
Behavior and Affect
The three-way ANOVA conducted on
Discussion
The present study was designed to contrast neural and subjective responses to monetary incentives in unmedicated depressed participants and never-depressed participants. Because affective disturbances are central symptoms of MDD, incentive processing might be altered. Moreover, anticipation represents a critical phase of incentive processing, because it has the potential to influence subsequent thought and behavior (54).
This research yielded three relevant results. First, because depressed
References (66)
- et al.
Implications of failing to achieve successful long-term maintenance treatment of recurrent unipolar major depression
Biol Psychiatry
(1998) - et al.
Evidence for attention to threatening stimuli in depression
Behav Res Ther
(1996) - et al.
Biased information processing as a vulnerability factor in depression
Behav Therapy
(1998) - et al.
Toward an objective characterization of an anhedonic phenotype: A signal-detection approach
Biol Psychiatry
(2005) Anterior cerebral asymmetry and the nature of emotion
Brain Cogn
(1992)- et al.
The neural correlates of anhedonia in major depressive disorder
Biol Psychiatry
(2005) - et al.
What is the role of dopamine in reward: Hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience?
Brain Res Rev
(1998) - et al.
Neural responses during anticipation of a primary taste reward
(2002) - et al.
FMRI visualization of brain activity during a monetary incentive delay task
NeuroImage
(2000) - et al.
A region of mesial prefrontal cortex tracks monetarily rewarding outcomes: Characterization with rapid event-related FMRI
NeuroImage
(2003)
AFNI: Software for analysis and visualization of functional magnetic resonance images
Comp Biomed Res
Parametric analysis of fMRI data using linear systems methods
NeuroImage
The neural basis of financial risk-taking
Neuron
Dysfunction of ventral striatal reward prediction in schizophrenia
NeuroImage
Deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression
Neuron
Cost of lost productive work time among US workers with depression
JAMA
The epidemiology of major depressive disorder: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R)
JAMA
Coherence and specificity of information-processing biases in depression and social phobia
J Abn Psychol
Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
Tripartite model of anxiety and depression: Psychometric evidence and taxonomic implications
J Abn Psychol
Neurobehavioral aspects of affective disorders
Ann Rev Psychol
Positive and negative affectivity and their relation to anxiety and depressive disorders
J Abnorm Psychol
Diminished response to pleasant stimuli by depressed women
J Abnorm Psychol
Sadness and amusement reactivity differentially predict concurrent and prospective functioning in major depressive disorder
Emotion
Emotion context insensitivity in Major Depressive Disorder
J Abn Psychol
Memory accessibility, mood regulation, and dysphoria: Difficulties in repairing sad mood with happy memories?
J Abn Psychol
Reward fails to alter response bias in depression
J Abn Psychol
Decreased responsiveness to reward in depression
Cogn Emot
Amygdala reactivity to emotional faces predicts improvement in major depression
NeuroReport
Behavioral activation and inhibition systems and the severity and course of depression
J Abnorm Psychol
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
Positive reinforcement produced by electrical stimulation of septal area and other regions of rat brain
J Comp Physiol Psychol
Chemoarchitecture of the Brain
Cited by (384)
Altered connectivity patterns of medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex underlie the severity of bulimic symptoms
2024, International Journal of Clinical and Health PsychologyStress to inflammation and anhedonia: Mechanistic insights from preclinical and clinical models
2023, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral ReviewsWhat is Computational Psychiatry Good For?
2023, Biological PsychiatryNeural responses to monetary incentives in postpartum women affected by baby blues
2023, PsychoneuroendocrinologyCitation Excerpt :However, in women with postpartum mood disorders, reward processing appears to be impaired, suggesting neural circuit dysfunctions in the reward system which contribute to mood problems (Post and Leuner, 2019). The monetary incentive delay (MID) task is a widely used and validated reward processing task adapted for use in human fMRI studies to investigate motivational salience processes in health and disease (Knutson et al., 2008). The MID task allows reward processing to be parsed into at least two distinct components, namely ‘anticipation’ and ‘feedback’.