Hou Lulu, Chang Lei, Chen Lirong, Zhou Renlai
Department of Psychology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China.
Front Psychiatry. 2020 Feb 13;11:28. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00028. eCollection 2020.
Nearly 50% of women of reproductive age worldwide experience premenstrual syndrome (PMS). Women with PMS exhibit low positive affect and low frontal electroencephalography asymmetry scores, both of which are associated with reward processing. These findings suggest that women with PMS may exhibit deficiencies in reward processing. A probabilistic reward task based on signal detection approach was used to assess reward responsiveness in 30 women with moderate-to-severe PMS and 31 controls without PMS. The results revealed that in the late luteal phase, the women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibited lower response bias and lower hit rate toward more frequently rewarded stimuli (rich stimuli) than the controls. By contrast, the response bias and hit rate did not differ between the two groups in the follicular phase. The group differences still remained after controlling for anhedonic symptoms. Furthermore, trial-by-trial probability analyses revealed that women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibited a trend of having a higher miss rate for rich stimuli than the controls. In particular, when a rich stimulus was preceded by an infrequently rewarded stimulus (a rewarded lean stimulus), participants in the PMS group exhibited a trend for higher miss rate than those in the control group in the late luteal and follicular phases. However, group differences in the probability analyses were nonsignificant after controlling for anhedonic symptoms. These results provide preliminary evidence that women with moderate-to-severe PMS exhibit dysfunctional reward responsiveness and impaired ability to modulate their behavior as a function of prior reinforcement.
全球近50%的育龄女性患有经前综合征（PMS）。患有经前综合征的女性表现出低积极情绪和低额叶脑电图不对称分数，这两者都与奖赏处理有关。这些发现表明，患有经前综合征的女性可能在奖赏处理方面存在缺陷。一项基于信号检测方法的概率性奖赏任务被用于评估30名中重度经前综合征女性和31名无经前综合征的对照组女性的奖赏反应性。结果显示，在黄体晚期，中重度经前综合征女性对更频繁得到奖赏的刺激（丰富刺激）表现出更低的反应偏向和更低的击中率，相比对照组。相比之下，在卵泡期两组之间的反应偏向和击中率没有差异。在控制了快感缺失症状后，组间差异仍然存在。此外，逐次试验概率分析显示，中重度经前综合征女性对丰富刺激的漏报率有高于对照组的趋势。特别是，当丰富刺激之前是一个很少得到奖赏的刺激（奖赏匮乏刺激）时，经前综合征组的参与者在黄体晚期和卵泡期表现出比对照组更高的漏报率趋势。然而，在控制了快感缺失症状后，概率分析中的组间差异不显著。这些结果提供了初步证据，表明中重度经前综合征女性表现出功能失调的奖赏反应性以及根据先前强化来调节其行为的能力受损。
