Subcomponents of reward processing in adolescent anhedonia

Ma, X., Sahni, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-1137-1207 and McCabe, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8704-3473 (2026) Subcomponents of reward processing in adolescent anhedonia. Nature Reviews Psychology. ISSN 2731-0574 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

Anhedonia is increasingly linked to dysfunctional reward processing and has been consistently reported to emerge during adolescence, a period of major developmental changes in the neurobiological and social aspects of reward experiences. Understanding anhedonia and the reward dysfunction that might underpin it could inform prevention and intervention efforts among young people, particularly for major depressive disorder. In this Review, we critically examine the relationship between anhedonia and reward processing in adolescence, including evidence from retrospective self-report questionnaires, task-based measures and ecological momentary assessment. We structure our synthesis according to the reward process subcomponents (consummatory pleasure, anticipation, motivation and learning) and with reference to the positive valence systems domain of the Research Domain Criteria framework and developmental perspectives. We discuss key limitations in the assessment of reward processing in adolescents and propose future directions to map real-time subjective anhedonia experiences to observable behaviour using objective task-based assessments.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/127949
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Life Sciences > School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences > Department of Psychology
Publisher	Springer
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