Neural Sensitivity to Social and Monetary Reward in Depression: Clarifying General and Domain-Specific Deficits.

Belel Ait Oumeziane,Olivia Jones,Dan Foti

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00199

Belel Ait Oumeziane, Olivia Jones + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2019.00199

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Abstract

Reward dysfunction is thought to be play a critical role in the pathogenesis of depression. Multiple studies have linked depression to abnormal neural sensitivity to monetary rewards, but it remains unclear whether this reward dysfunction is generalizable to other rewards types. The current study begins to address this gap by assessing abnormal sensitivity to both monetary and social rewards in relation to depressive symptoms. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during two incentive delay tasks, one with monetary reward and one with social reward. Both tasks were administered within the same sample, enabling a direct comparison of reward types. ERPs elicited by social and nonsocial rewards were morphologically similar across several stages of processing: cue salience, outcome anticipation, early outcome evaluation, outcome salience. Moderation analyses showed depression was linked with a pattern of general deficits across social and monetary rewards, specifically for the stages of outcome anticipation (stimulus-preceding negativity) and outcome salience (feedback-P3); self-reported reward sensitivity was generally associated with early outcome evaluation (reward positivity). Regression analyses modeling task-specific variance, however, showed a unique association between depression and outcome salience for social rewards, controlling for monetary rewards. The findings from this study underscore the importance of assessing neural sensitivity to multiple reward types in depression, particularly social reward. Characterizing the profile of reward functioning in depression across reward types may help to link laboratory-based deficits to relatively global vs. focal difficulties in real-world functioning.

Highlights

Major depressive disorder (MDD) ranks among the most prevalent and economically onerous medical conditions, having an estimated lifetime prevalence rate of 16% (Kessler et al, 2003) and an annual cost of more than $80 billion (Greenberg et al, 2015)
We focus on reward processing in the context of social and nonsocial domains across various stages of processing to better characterize the nature of the impairments in depression
We extended the literature by leveraging the social and nonsocial reward event-related potentials (ERPs) framework to the study of individual differences in depressive symptomatology and self-reported trait reward sensitivity

Summary

Introduction

Major depressive disorder (MDD) ranks among the most prevalent and economically onerous medical conditions, having an estimated lifetime prevalence rate of 16% (Kessler et al, 2003) and an annual cost of more than $80 billion (Greenberg et al, 2015) Given these alarming statistics, there has been a growing focus on better understanding the core pathophysiological processes of depression. Existing behavioral studies have linked depression with a rigid response style that is insensitive to reward contingencies (Henriques and Davidson, 2000; Pizzagalli et al, 2008), which is linked to anhedonia severity (Pizzagalli et al, 2005) and prospectively predicts poor treatment outcome (Vrieze et al, 2013). These regions comprise the mesocorticolimbic dopamine system and are core areas involved in reward processing more broadly (Liu et al, 2011)

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