Taken together, these findings make the provocative suggestion that anhedonia may be adaptive in the face of the learning differences resulting from early-life unpredictability, in particular in environments where individuals face persistent threats in their pursuit of rewards.
One week until my PhD defense!
Please join me next Friday, as I discuss my research on the neurobiology of anhedonia following early life unpredictability in adolescent and young adult cohorts using neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience techniques.
Register here: uci.zoom.us/meeting/regi...
How do early life experiences, such as unpredictability (ELU) affect decisions? ELU has substantial impact on mental health–in particular, increasing the incidence of anhedonia. Our work asks why this might be: Does anhedonia moderate the effects of ELU on behavior?
Anhedonia, on the other hand, *increased* adherence to the optimal survival policy, by reducing overharvesting and promoting threat avoidance.
See you tonight! Here to chat about motivational conflict, early life adversity, anhedonia, and more 💡
Consistent with prior work, high-ELU individuals were less likely to make optimal decisions in this task, in a sex-dependent manner.
Publishing highlight of 2025, getting to look at PVT neurons under the microscope and co-first-authoring this paper :D
We developed a novel motivational conflict task that can identify distinct influences of ELU and anhedonia on choice.
New preprint! “Anhedonia buffers the effects of early-life unpredictability on threat-reward decision making” w\ @malejandra.bsky.social, Yifan Zhang, @mikeyassa.bsky.social, @aaronbornstein.bsky.social & many more! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Further analysis suggests that anhedonia supports optimal play in our task through an increase in threat feedback sensitivity. Participants with higher anhedonia scores were more likely to choose “wait” following a surprising robbery event by the Zorn predator.
