Goal progress shapes hedonic experience

Reward experience guides human behaviour and is essential to wellbeing. Impairments in the capacity to experience reward, such as consummatory anhedonia, have been conceptualised as a fundamental primary hedonic deficit, however there is little evidence to support this view. We previously proposed that hedonic experience instead arises from alterations in the subjective interpretation of events in relation to personally meaningful goals, which we formalise using a Reinforcement-Learning framework. Across three experiments (N=500), including discovery and pre-registered replication studies, we find support for the core predictions of the theory; we show that progress towards individuals' current goals were related to positive hedonic experience in a proximity-dependent manner, with more important goals eliciting a greater hedonic response. Furthermore, manipulating the structure of the underlying belief space affected subjective hedonic experience. These findings suggest that alterations in human hedonic experience may reflect disruptions to more complex evaluative processes.