Effects of maladaptive emotion regulation on brain-behavior markers of anhedonia in depression vulnerability

Anhedonia and perseverative cognition—a maladaptive form of emotion regulation—are hallmarks of the depressive phenotype. Both symptoms have been linked to adverse outcomes in the management of depression, including a poor disease course and worse response to treatments. While their potential interaction in maintaining depression has been hypothesized, the underlying mechanisms remain unexplored. In a within-subjects design, electrophysiological measures of reward responsiveness were assessed during performance on the Probabilistic Reward Task (PRT) before and after an experimental induction of perseverative cognition or an active control condition in 62 individuals (n=38 females) with varying severity of depressive symptoms. Visualanalog scales (VAS) were administered before and after each experimental manipulation to evaluate momentary levels of state perseverative cognition. Electroencephalography was recorded continuously throughout the protocol to derive event-related potentials following reward feedback. Our results revealed a significantly blunted response bias toward the most frequently rewarded stimulus when participants performed the PRT following the perseverative cognition induction compared to the control condition, indicating anhedonia-like effects (p<.001). This effect was most pronounced in individuals with more severe depressive symptoms. Electrophysiological analyses showed a larger feedbackrelated negativity (FRN) to reward feedback during the perseverative condition, especially among those with more severe depressive symptoms (p=.011). Notably, we observed significant negative correlations between FRN amplitude and both behavioral changes in response bias and subjective changes in VAS ratings following perseverative cognition induction (ps<.038). These findings suggest that state levels of perseverative cognition, such as rumination, can acutely impair reward responsiveness, particularly in those most vulnerable to depression. This underscores the crucial role of perseverative cognition in exacerbating reward processing deficits and highlights how maladaptive emotion regulation can significantly impact the severity of anhedonia. Understanding these state-like aspects offers advanced insights into the development of targeted therapeutic strategies to improve emotion regulation in individuals with vulnerability to depression.