Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Depression is characterized by altered sensitivity to rewards, with recent evidence suggesting that the ability to sustain responses to rewards across long experimental tasks is diminished. Most work on sustained reward responsiveness has taken a cat- egorical approach and focused on major depressive disorder. However, impairments in reward sensitivity are also found at lower levels of symptom severity and may be relevant for understanding basic mechanisms linking reward processing abnormali- ties to depression. The current study took a dimensional approach to examine the relation between depression symptoms and sustained reward responsiveness by examining how early neural responses to rewards and …