Hedonic deficit in anhedonia: support for the role of approach motivation

Anhedonia is defined as the diminished capacity to experience pleasure. How ever, previous research comparing the response of high and low scorers on t he Scale for Physical Anhedonia (Chapman, I,. J., Chapman, J.P., & Raulin, M.L. (1976). Scales for physical and social anhedonia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85 (4), 374-382) to positive emotion-eliciting stimuli has not produced consistent support for hedonic deficit in anhedonia. Basing hypoth eses on a neurobehavioral model of positive affect, the present study exami ned both hedonic experience and the proposed motivational substrates of hed onic experience in anhedonia. Specifically, to examine the linkage between anhedonia, approach motivation, and positive affect, 339 participants compl eted measures designed to assess these constructs. A subset of these partic ipants, who were either high or low scorers on the Scale for Physical Anhed onia, also rated their affective response to positive, negative? and neutra l sensory stimuli. Although anhedonia was associated with diminished genera l positive affect, diminished intensity of emotional experience, and dimini shed self-report of approach motivation, it was unrelated to participants' self-report of emotional experience to sensory stimuli. However, a measure of approach motivation was significantly related to self-report of positive emotional experience to sensory cues and stimuli, suggesting that approach motivation may be a better index of hedonic deficit than a commonly used a nhedonia measure. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.