Blain Bastien, Pinhorn India, Sharot Tali
Affective Brain Lab, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK.
Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, UK.
Nat Ment Health. 2023;1(9):679-691. doi: 10.1038/s44220-023-00116-x. Epub 2023 Sep 6.
Humans frequently engage in intrinsically rewarding activities (for example, consuming art, reading). Despite such activities seeming diverse, we show that sensitivity to intrinsic rewards is domain general and associated with mental health. In this cross-sectional study, participants online ( = 483) were presented with putative visual, cognitive and social intrinsic rewards as well as monetary rewards and neutral stimuli. All rewards elicited positive feelings (were 'liked'), generated consummatory behaviour (were 'wanted') and increased the likelihood of the action leading to them (were 'reinforcing'). Factor analysis revealed that ~40% of response variance across stimuli was explained by a general sensitivity to all rewards, but not to neutral stimuli. Affective aspects of mental health were associated with sensitivity to intrinsic, but not monetary, rewards. These results may help explain thriving and suffering: individuals with high reward sensitivity will engage in a variety of intrinsically rewarding activities, eventually finding those they excel at, whereas low sensitivity individuals will not.
人类经常参与具有内在奖励的活动（例如，欣赏艺术、阅读）。尽管这些活动看似多种多样，但我们发现，对内在奖励的敏感性具有领域普遍性，且与心理健康相关。在这项横断面研究中，在线参与者（n = 483）面对的是假定的视觉、认知和社会内在奖励以及金钱奖励和中性刺激。所有奖励都会引发积极情绪（“被喜欢”），产生满足行为（“被渴望”），并增加导致奖励行为的可能性（“具有强化作用”）。因子分析表明，所有刺激反应方差的约40%可由对所有奖励而非中性刺激的一般敏感性来解释。心理健康的情感方面与对内在奖励而非金钱奖励的敏感性相关。这些结果可能有助于解释蓬勃发展与痛苦挣扎的原因：奖励敏感性高的个体将参与各种具有内在奖励的活动，最终找到自己擅长的活动，而敏感性低的个体则不会。
