Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States of America.
Depression and Anxiety Center for Discovery and Treatment, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2023 Mar 15;18(3):e0282727. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282727. eCollection 2023.
The sense of agency, or the belief in action causality, is an elusive construct that impacts day-to-day experience and decision-making. Despite its relevance in a range of neuropsychiatric disorders, it is widely under-studied and remains difficult to measure objectively in patient populations. We developed and tested a novel cognitive measure of reward-dependent agency perception in an in-person and online cohort.
The in-person cohort consisted of 52 healthy control subjects and 20 subjects with depression and anxiety disorders (DA), including major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. The online sample consisted of 254 participants. The task consisted of an effort implementation for monetary rewards with computerized visual feedback interference and trial-by-trial ratings of self versus other agency.
All subjects across both cohorts demonstrated higher self-agency after receiving positive-win feedback, compared to negative-loss feedback when the level of computer inference was kept constant. Patients with DA showed reduced positive feedback-dependent agency compared to healthy controls. Finally, in our online sample, we found that higher self-agency following negative-loss feedback was associated with worse anhedonia symptoms.
Together this work suggests how positive and negative environmental information impacts the sense of self-agency in healthy subjects, and how it is perturbed in patients with depression and anxiety.
能动性感知，即对行动因果关系的信念，是一种难以捉摸的结构，它会影响到日常生活体验和决策。尽管它与一系列神经精神障碍有关，但它在很大程度上研究不足，并且在患者群体中仍然难以客观地衡量。我们开发并测试了一种新的认知方法，用于测量线下和线上患者群体的奖励依赖型能动性感知。
线下队列包括 52 名健康对照组和 20 名患有抑郁和焦虑障碍（DA）的受试者，包括重度抑郁症和广泛性焦虑症。在线样本由 254 名参与者组成。任务包括为金钱奖励付出努力，同时有计算机视觉反馈干扰，以及自我与他人能动性的逐次评估。
两个队列的所有受试者在接收到正性赢反馈时，与在计算机干扰保持不变时接收到负性输反馈相比，自我能动性更高。患有 DA 的患者表现出的正性反馈依赖型能动性比健康对照组低。最后，在我们的在线样本中，我们发现负性输反馈后的更高自我能动性与更严重的快感缺失症状有关。
综上所述，这项工作表明正性和负性环境信息如何影响健康受试者的自我能动性感知，以及在抑郁和焦虑患者中它是如何受到干扰的。
