Reduced reward bias for exerting personal control is associated with self-reported anhedonia

Anhedonia is a pernicious and transdiagnostic set of psychiatric symptoms, including decreased motivation and blunted response to rewards. These reward processing deficits are found across a range of psychiatric conditions including depression, social anxiety, and substance use disorder, and are linked to worse psychiatric outcomes. Healthy individuals are known to experience reward responses to a variety of stimuli including perceived opportunities to make choices (i.e., exert personal control) that lead to monetary outcomes. Critically, perceived personal control has been shown to be rewarding even when exerting control cannot lead to greater monetary reward. However, the association between anhedonia and responsivity to personal control is not well understood. Using a sample of university students (n = 62), the current study examined the association between self-reported anhedonia and behavioral responsivity to opportunities to exert (perceived) personal control over monetary outcomes in a signal detection task. In a novel behavioral task, the ‘Choice Bias Task’, participants were shown stimuli linked to monetary outcomes. In one task condition, participants were given a ‘free choice’ (perceived personal control condition) between stimuli for a subsequent monetary reward and in another task condition, participants were given a ‘forced choice’ and told which stimuli to choose for a subsequent monetary reward (no control condition). Critically, monetary outcomes were equal between the personal control and no control conditions. Using signal detection analyses, I examined the development of a bias for personal control across blocks of the task and how this ‘choice bias’ was associated with anhedonia. While there was no bias for choice across at the group level, choice bias was significantly associated with self-reported anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia, such that more anhedonic individuals exhibited lower decisional bias towards perceived opportunities to exert personal control. These findings suggest that opportunities for exerting personal control may be less reinforcing for individuals with higher levels of anhedonia. Future work should examine associations between anhedonia and reward responses across different reward domains including the domain of personal control, which has been shown to be normatively rewarding.