Department of Psychology, Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA ; Center for Depression, Anxiety and Stress Research, Harvard Medical School, McLean Hospital Belmont, MA, USA.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Apr 11;7:133. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00133. eCollection 2013.
Stress may promote the onset of psychopathology by disrupting reward processing. However, the extent to which stress impairs reward processing, rather than incentive processing more generally, is unclear. To evaluate the specificity of stress-induced reward processing disruption, 100 psychiatrically healthy females were administered a probabilistic stimulus selection task (PSST) that enabled comparison of sensitivity to reward-driven (Go) and punishment-driven (NoGo) learning under either "no stress" or "stress" (threat-of-shock) conditions. Cortisol samples and self-report measures were collected. Contrary to hypotheses, the groups did not differ significantly in task performance or cortisol reactivity. However, further analyses focusing only on individuals under "stress" who were high responders with regard to both cortisol reactivity and self-reported negative affect revealed reduced reward sensitivity relative to individuals tested in the "no stress" condition; importantly, these deficits were reward-specific. Overall, findings provide preliminary evidence that stress-reactive individuals show diminished sensitivity to reward, but not punishment, under stress. While such results highlight the possibility that stress-induced anhedonia might be an important mechanism linking stress to affective disorders, future studies are necessary to confirm this conjecture.
压力可能通过破坏奖励处理来促进精神病理学的发生。然而，压力损害奖励处理的程度，而不是更一般地损害激励处理，尚不清楚。为了评估应激引起的奖励处理破坏的特异性，100 名精神健康的女性接受了概率性刺激选择任务（PSST），该任务能够比较在“无压力”或“压力”（电击威胁）条件下对奖励驱动（Go）和惩罚驱动（NoGo）学习的敏感性。收集了皮质醇样本和自我报告测量值。与假设相反，两组在任务表现或皮质醇反应性方面没有显著差异。然而，仅关注那些在皮质醇反应性和自我报告的负面情绪方面均为高反应者的“压力”下的个体的进一步分析显示，与在“无压力”条件下测试的个体相比，奖励敏感性降低；重要的是，这些缺陷是奖励特异性的。总体而言，这些发现提供了初步证据，表明应激反应个体在应激下对奖励而不是惩罚的敏感性降低。虽然这些结果强调了应激引起的快感缺失可能是将应激与情感障碍联系起来的重要机制，但需要进一步的研究来证实这一推测。
