Affective Forecasting in Individuals with Social Anhedonia: The Role of Social Components in Anticipated Emotion, Prospection and Neural Activation

Background: Affective forecasting, or the ability to forecast emotional responses to future events, is essential to everyday life adaption. Previous research suggests that individuals with social anhedonia exhibit deficits in affective forecasting, but the pattern of these deficits and their neural correlates are not known.

Methods: Individuals with social anhedonia (n = 40) and healthy controls (n = 46) completed a social affective forecasting task and underwent resting-state fMRI scanning.

Results: Compared with healthy controls, social anhedonia individuals anticipated reduced pleasure especially in social conditions and their prospection contained less visualization, voice, taste, self-referential thoughts, other-referential thoughts and language communication. Moreover, anticipated pleasure (valence and arousal for positive events) was positively associated with effort level, especially in social conditions. The social anhedonia group also exhibited stronger functional connectivity between the retrosplenial cortex and the insula and reduced functional connectivity between the hippocampal formation and the parahippocampus. These altered functional connectivities were correlated with anticipated valence in social, but not non-social, conditions.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that individuals with social anhedonia anticipate less pleasure predominately in social conditions and impaired prospection may contribute to the reduced anticipated pleasure. Reduced anticipated pleasure may be a target to improve social motivation in social anhedonia individuals.