Abstract
Nearly 50% of women of reproductive age worldwide experience premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Women with PMS exhibit low positive affect and low frontal electroencephalography asymmetry scores, both of which are associated with reward processing. These findings suggest that women with PMS may exhibit deficiencies in reward processing. A probabilistic reward task based on signal detection approach was used to assess reward responsiveness in 30 women with moderate-to-severe PMS and 31 controls without PMS. The results revealed that in the late luteal phase, the women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibited lower response bias and lower hit rate toward more frequently rewarded stimuli (rich stimuli) than the controls. By contrast, the response bias and hit rate did not differ between the two groups in the follicular phase. The group differences still remained after controlling for anhedonic symptoms. Furthermore, trial-by-trial probability analyses revealed that women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibited a trend of having a higher miss rate for rich stimuli than the controls. In particular, when a rich stimulus was preceded by an infrequently rewarded stimulus (a rewarded lean stimulus), participants in the PMS group exhibited a trend for higher miss rate than those in the control group in the late luteal and follicular phases. However, group differences in the probability analyses were nonsignificant after controlling for anhedonic symptoms. These results provide preliminary evidence that women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibit dysfunctional reward responsiveness and impaired ability to modulate their behavior as a function of prior reinforcement.
Highlights
Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) refers to a set of physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that occur periodically in women during the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, peaking within the week preceding menses and improving or disappearing after the onset of menses [1,2,3]
To determine if altered reward responsiveness represents a stable vulnerability to PMS that is not caused by differences in other variables, we evaluated whether the group differences remained even when statistically controlling for Snaith–Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) scores, which are used to assess altered reward processing [26]
This study explored the relationship between PMS and altered reward processing by asking women with moderate-to-severe PMS and without PMS to complete a probabilistic reward task (PRT) in the late luteal and follicular phases
Summary
Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) refers to a set of physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that occur periodically in women during the late luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, peaking within the week preceding menses and improving or disappearing after the onset of menses [1,2,3]. Several studies have revealed that some women with PMS experience abnormal emotional reactions to positive events in daily life and exhibit deficiencies in self-reported physiological response to positive stimuli under laboratory conditions during the late luteal phase. Cluster analysis revealed that in the women with PMS, positive affect peaked on the 11th day of the menstrual cycle, whereas the women without PMS did not exhibit any significant peak. The intensity of positive responses to the same images in a group of women without PMS exhibited an increasing trend. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that PMS is characterized by low positive affect
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