Linking anhedonia symptoms with behavioural and neural reward responses in adolescent depression

Adolescence is a period of change that crucially increases vulnerability to depression. Studies report blunted neural responses to reward that relate to positive affect and depression symptoms in adolescents. However how these results relate to the symptom of anhedonia in adolescents is not entirely clear. Anhedonia is not a unitary construct, but is described as having different processes (e.g. wanting vs. liking) each underpinned by different neurobiological pathways. Current studies report inconsistencies in findings when trying to relate reward processing at the behavioural and neural level with symptoms. One reason for this is the lack of specificity of clinical, behavioural and neural tasks for measuring reward in depression. Links between the experience of anhedonia in adolescent depression and the behavioural and neural measures of reward could be improved with more detailed questionnaires, more detailed measurements of the components of reward for e.g. decreased motivation/effort and more ecologically valid tasks relevant to adolescents, in the MRI scanner