Failures to replicate results in psychiatric genetics might be due to our inability to define the heritable phenotype. Instead of relying entirely on classical nosographical approaches, the use of a candidate symptom approach to identify more homogeneous forms of diseases among affected subjects and subclinical traits among first-degree relatives may increase genetic validity. Anhedonia may be ...

BACKGROUND Recent trends in psychiatry have emphasized the need for a shift from categorical to dimensional approaches. Of critical importance to this transformation is the availability of tools to objectively quantify behaviors dimensionally. The present study focuses on social motivation, a dimension of behavior that is central to a range of psychiatric conditions but for which a particularly...

Anhedonia refers to the reduced ability to experience pleasure, and has been studied in different neuropsychiatric disorders. Anhedonia is nevertheless considered as a core feature of major depressive disorder, according to DSM-IV criteria for major depression and the definition of melancholic subtype, and regarding its capacity to predict antidepressant response. Behavioral, electrophysiologic...

The present study investigated the ERP correlates of the integration of emotional prosody to the emotional meaning of a spoken word. Thirty-four nonclinical participants listened to negative and positive words that were spoken with an angry or happy prosody and classified the emotional valence of the word meaning while ignoring emotional prosody. Social anhedonia was also self-rated by the subj...

Given the limited data available in literature, aim of this study was to investigate potential role played by temporal dynamics anhedonia (lifelong and recent changes anhedonia) occurrence suicidal ideations major depressed subjects. The clinical 285 subjects recruited from database Erasme Hospital Sleep Laboratory were analyzed. A score on item nine Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II) ≥1 and/or...

Apathy is a common condition in Parkinson's disease (PD) and is generally defined as a lack of motivation. It is associated with more severe cognitive dysfunction and a decrease in activities of daily living (ADL) performance. Anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure, can be a symptom of both depressive and apathetic syndromes. The Movement Disorder Society (MDS) commissioned a task forc...

BACKGROUND Anhedonia, the lowered ability to experience pleasure, is one of the non-motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) that is underdiagnosed and consequently undertreated. Few studies have investigated anhedonia in PD by taking into account the influence of socio-demographic variables and versus a control group composed of patients with a pure motor neurologic disease other than PD. Th...

CONTEXT The endocannabinoid system has been implicated in stress adaptation and the regulation of mood in rodent studies, but few human association studies have examined these links and replications are limited. OBJECTIVES To examine whether a synonymous polymorphism, rs1049353, in exon 4 of the gene encoding the human endocannabinoid receptor (CNR1) moderates the effect of self-reported chil...

The meanings of "anhedonia" and "depressed mood," the cardinal emotional symptoms of major depression, may be shaped by cultural norms regarding pleasure and sadness. Thirty-two European Americans, 26 Hispanic Americans, 33 Asian Americans, and 20 Russian Americans provided reports of (a) depressive symptoms, (b) momentary emotions and pleasure, and (c) global subjective well-being. Momentary r...

Depression and cigarette smoking co-occur at high rates. However, the etiological mechanisms that contribute to this relationship remain unclear. Anhedonia and associated impairments in reward learning are key features of depression, which also have been linked to the onset and maintenance of cigarette smoking. However, few studies have investigated differences in anhedonia and reward learning ...