Anhedonia buffers the effects of early-life unpredictability on threat-reward decision-making

Anhedonia – the diminished capacity to experience or anticipate pleasure – is among the most common consequences of early-life unpredictability, yet how these co-occurring conditions jointly shape real-world decision-making remains unknown. Here, we use a sequential foraging-under-threat task to probe motivational conflict decisions in 357 individuals varying in early-life unpredictability and anhedonia symptoms. We find that unpredictability and anhedonia exert opposing influences on choice: unpredictability shifts behavior away from the survival-optimal policy in a sex-dependent manner, while anhedonia promotes adherence to it, partly through heightened sensitivity to unexpected threatening outcomes. A mediation analysis reveals that anhedonia partially buffers the deleterious effects of unpredictability on decision quality. These results demonstrate that co-occurring conditions can mask one another’s behavioral signatures and suggest that the heterogeneous expression of transdiagnostic constructs like anhedonia may reflect context-dependent adaptations to distinct underlying etiologies.