UNASSIGNED: Eating disorders (EDs) are conceptualized as disorders of under- and over-control, with impulsivity reflecting under-control. Extant research indicates that impulsivity and related factors such as reward sensitivity and punishment sensitivity may serve as trait-level transdiagnostic risk and/or maintenance factors in EDs. Findings on impulsivity and reward and punishment sensitivity by diagnosis are mixed and research on the relationship between these factors and ED symptoms, hospital course, and treatment outcomes is limited.
UNASSIGNED: Participants (N = 228) were patients admitted to a specialized inpatient behavioral treatment program for EDs who agreed to participate in a longitudinal study and completed self-report measures of impulsivity, reward sensitivity, and punishment sensitivity at admission. Weight and ED symptomatology were measured at admission and discharge. Hospital course variables included length of stay and premature treatment dropout.
UNASSIGNED: Impulsivity was lower in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN) restricting type compared to those with AN binge/purge type or bulimia nervosa; no other group differences were observed. Higher impulsivity was associated with greater bulimic symptoms on the Eating Disorder Inventory 2 (EDI-2) at admission. Impulsivity was not related to ED symptoms, weight outcomes, length of hospital stay, or treatment dropout at program discharge.
UNASSIGNED: Impulsivity may help distinguish restrictive versus binge/purge EDs, but does not necessarily relate to discharge outcomes in an intensive inpatient ED program. Findings from this study provide novel contributions to the literature on personality traits in EDs and have important clinical implications. Results suggest that patients with higher levels of impulsivity or reward and punishment sensitivity can be expected to respond to inpatient treatment. Suggestions for future research are discussed.

BACKGROUND: Adolescent substance use poses a critical public health challenge, intertwined with risk-taking behavior, criminality, functional impairment, and comorbid mental and physical health issues. Adolescents with bipolar spectrum disorders (BSD) exhibit heightened susceptibility to substance use, necessitating a nuanced exploration of the bipolar-substance use relationship.
METHODS: This study addressed gaps in the literature by employing a prospective, longitudinal design with 443 Philadelphia-area adolescents, tracking BSD symptoms and substance use. We predicted that BSD symptoms would be associated with increases in substance use, and that these effects would be more pronounced for individuals with a BSD and those with high reward sensitivity.
RESULTS: Hypomanic symptoms predicted subsequent substance use, with a stronger association observed in individuals diagnosed with BSD. Contrary to expectations, depressive symptoms did not exhibit a similar relationship. Although the hypothesized moderating role of reward sensitivity was not supported, higher reward sensitivity predicted increased substance use.
CONCLUSIONS: Symptoms and substance use are only captured for the month prior to each session due to the assessment timeline. This highlights the benefits of frequent assessments over a shorter time frame to monitor real-time changes. Alternative classification methods for reward sensitivity, such as brain or behavior-based assessments, might yield different results.
CONCLUSIONS: This study\'s contributions include evaluating substance use broadly, utilizing a longitudinal design for temporal clarity, and shifting the focus from substance use predicting mood symptoms to the inverse. The findings underscore the need for continued exploration of mood symptom predictors of substance use, emphasizing the role of reward sensitivity.

Social comparison is a common phenomenon in our daily life, through which people get to know themselves, and plays an important role in depression. In this study, event-related potential (ERP) was used to explore the temporal course of social comparison processing in the subthreshold depression group. Electrophysiological recordings were acquired from 30 subthreshold depressed individuals and 31 healthy individuals while they conducted the adapted dot estimation task. The ERP results revealed that there was a significant difference of feedback-related negativity (FRN) in the process of social comparison. Especially only in the subthreshold depression, the FRN amplitudes of worse off than some, better off than many comparisons were larger than those of upward comparisons and downward comparisons. Our results suggested that the abnormal reward sensitivity for worse off than some, better off than many comparisons might be prodromal symptoms in the subthreshold depression.

Aberrant levels of reward sensitivity have been linked to substance use disorder and are characterized by alterations in reward processing in the ventral striatum (VS). Less is known about how reward sensitivity and subclinical substance use relate to striatal function during social rewards (e.g. positive peer feedback). Testing this relation is critical for predicting risk for development of substance use disorder. In this pre-registered study, participants (N = 44) underwent fMRI while completing well-matched tasks that assess neural response to reward in social and monetary domains. Contrary to our hypotheses, aberrant reward sensitivity blunted the relationship between substance use and striatal activation during receipt of rewards, regardless of domain. Moreover, exploratory whole-brain analyses showed unique relations between substance use and social rewards in temporoparietal junction. Psychophysiological interactions demonstrated that aberrant reward sensitivity is associated with increased connectivity between the VS and ventromedial prefrontal cortex during social rewards. Finally, we found that substance use was associated with decreased connectivity between the VS and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for social rewards, independent of reward sensitivity. These findings demonstrate nuanced relations between reward sensitivity and substance use, even among those without substance use disorder, and suggest altered reward-related engagement of cortico-VS responses as potential predictors of developing disordered behavior.

In patients with mood disorders, negative affective biases - systematically prioritising and interpreting information negatively - are common. A translational cognitive task testing this bias has shown that depressed patients have a reduced preference for a high reward under ambiguous decision-making conditions. The precise mechanisms underscoring this bias are, however, not yet understood. We therefore developed a set of measures to probe the underlying source of the behavioural bias by testing its relationship to a participant\'s reward sensitivity, value sensitivity and reward learning rate. One-hundred-forty-eight participants completed three online behavioural tasks: the original ambiguous-cue decision-making task probing negative affective bias, a probabilistic reward learning task probing reward sensitivity and reward learning rate, and a gambling task probing value sensitivity. We modelled the learning task through a dynamic signal detection theory model and the gambling task through an expectation-maximisation prospect theory model. Reward sensitivity from the probabilistic reward task (β = 0.131, p = 0.024) and setting noise from the probabilistic reward task (β = -0.187, p = 0.028) both predicted the affective bias score in a logistic regression. Increased negative affective bias, at least on this specific task, may therefore be driven in part by a combination of reduced sensitivity to rewards and more variable responses.

BACKGROUND: The neural underpinnings underlying individual differences in nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity and smoking progression are poorly understood. Thus, we investigated whether brain resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) during smoking abstinence predicts nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity and smoking progression in young light smokers. We hypothesized that high rsFC between brain areas with high densities of nicotinic receptors (insula, anterior cingulate cortex [ACC], hippocampus, thalamus) and areas involved in reward-seeking (nucleus accumbens [NAcc], prefrontal cortex [PFC]) would predict nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity and smoking progression.
METHODS: Young light smokers (N=64, age 18-24, M = 1.89 cigarettes/day) participated in the study. These individuals smoked between 5 to 35 cigarettes per week and lifetime use never exceeded 35 cigarettes per week. Their rsFC was assessed using functional magnetic resonance imaging after 14-hour nicotine-deprivation. Subjects also completed a probabilistic reward task after smoking a placebo on one day and a regular cigarette on another day.
RESULTS: The probabilistic-reward-task assessed greater nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity was associated with greater rsFC between the right anterior PFC and right NAcc, but with reduced rsFC between the ACC and left inferior prefrontal gyrus and the insula and ACC. Decreased rsFC within the salience network (ACC and insula) predicted increased smoking progression across 18 months and greater nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide the first evidence that differences in rsFCs in young light smokers are associated with nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity and smoking progression.
CONCLUSIONS: Weaker rsFC within the salience network predicted greater nicotine-enhanced reward sensitivity and smoking progression. These findings suggest that salience network rsFC and drug-enhanced reward sensitivity may be useful tools and potential endophenotypes for reward sensitivity and drug-dependence research.

UNASSIGNED: Repetitive Nonsuicidal Self-Injury (R-NSSI) is complex and prevalent in adolescents. Although the reward system is a promising mechanism to explain R-NSSI, the specific processes of reward and punishment related to R-NSSI remain unclear. This study examined whether adolescents with R-NSSI displayed difficulties in both reward and punishment contexts, and further explored the role of inhibitory control in processing monetary reward and punishment.
UNASSIGNED: Within a cohort from two middle schools (N = 3,475, 48.6 % female, Mage = 12.95), a total of 187 adolescents completed three novel behavioral tasks. Specifically, in Study 1, 36 adolescents with R-NSSI and 28 without NSSI completed adapted incentive-delay tasks to evaluate sensitivity to reward and punishment. In Study 2, 27 adolescents with R-NSSI and 21 without NSSI were given novel incentive delay-two choice oddball task to evaluate the interaction between reward and inhibitory control. In Study 3, 38 adolescents with R-NSSI and 35 without NSSI completed similar task to assess the interaction between punishment and inhibitory control.
UNASSIGNED: Adolescents with R-NSSI were characterized by higher levels of behavioral reward and punishment sensitivity than adolescents without NSSI. More importantly, the difference between reward and punishment in inhibitory control of R-NSSI was found. Compared to adolescents without NSSI, adolescents with R-NSSI showed lower levels of inhibitory control in response to cues depicting punishment content but not to those depicting reward content.
UNASSIGNED: This study provides novel experimental evidence that heightened behavioral sensitivity to both reward and punishment may be relevant trait marker in R-NSSI among adolescents, and emphasizes that punishment not reward interact with inhibitory control in the R-NSSI.

Processing and learning from affective cues to guide goal-directed behavior may be particularly important during adolescence; yet the factors that promote and/or disrupt the ability to integrate value in order to guide decision making across development remain unclear. The present study (N = 1046) assessed individual difference factors (self-reported punishment and reward sensitivity) related to whether previously-rewarded and previously-punished cues differentially impact goal-directed behavior (response inhibition) in a large developmental sample. Participants were between the ages of 8-21 years (Mage = 14.29, SD = 3.97, 50.38% female). Previously-rewarded cues improved response inhibition among participants age 14 and older. Further, punishment sensitivity predicted overall improved response inhibition among participants aged 10 to 18. The results highlight two main factors that are associated with improvements in the ability to integrate value to guide goal-directed behaviour - cues in the environment (e.g., reward-laden cues) and individual differences in punishment sensitivity. These findings have implications for both educational and social policies aimed at characterizing the ways in which youth integrate value to guide decision making.

BACKGROUND: Abnormal reward sensitivity is a risk factor for psychiatric disorders, including eating disorders such as overeating and binge-eating disorder, but the brain structural mechanisms that underlie it are not completely understood. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between multimodal whole-brain structural features and reward sensitivity in nonhuman primates.
METHODS: Reward sensitivity was evaluated through behavioral economic analysis in which monkeys (adult rhesus macaques; 7 female, 5 male) responded for sweetened condensed milk (10%, 30%, 56%), Gatorade, or water using an operant procedure in which the response requirement increased incrementally across sessions (i.e., fixed ratio 1, 3, 10). Animals were divided into high (n = 6) or low (n = 6) reward sensitivity groups based on essential value for 30% milk. Multimodal magnetic resonance imaging was used to measure gray matter volume and white matter microstructure. Brain structural features were compared between groups, and their correlations with reward sensitivity for various stimuli was investigated.
RESULTS: Animals in the high sensitivity group had greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, centromedial amygdaloid complex, and middle cingulate cortex volumes than animals in the low sensitivity group. Furthermore, compared with monkeys in the low sensitivity group, high sensitivity monkeys had lower fractional anisotropy in the left dorsal cingulate bundle connecting the centromedial amygdaloid complex and middle cingulate cortex to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus 1 connecting the middle cingulate cortex to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that neuroanatomical variation in prefrontal-limbic circuitry is associated with reward sensitivity. These brain structural features may serve as predictive biomarkers for vulnerability to food-based and other reward-related disorders.

Trait reward sensitivity, risk for developing substance use, and mood disorders have each been linked with altered striatal responses to reward. Moreover, striatal response to reward is sensitive to social context, such as the presence of a peer, and drugs are often sought out and consumed in social contexts or as a result of social experiences. Thus, mood disorder symptoms, striatal responses to social context and social reward may play a role in substance use. To investigate this possibility, this dataset was collected as part of a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) grant titled \"Aberrant Reward Sensitivity: Mechanisms Underlying Substance Use\" (R03-DA046733). The overarching goal was to characterize the associations between neural responses to social and nonsocial rewards, trait reward sensitivity, substance use, and mood disorder symptoms. After obtaining questionnaire data quantifying reward sensitivity, substance use, and other psychosocial characteristics, young adults (N=59; 14 male, 45 female; mean age: 20.89 years ± 1.75 years) completed four fMRI tasks testing different features of social and reward processing. These included: 1) a strategic reward-based decision-making task with Ultimatum and Dictator Game conditions; 2) a task where participants shared rewards or losses with peers, strangers, or non-human partners; 3) a task in which participants received well-matched social and monetary rewards and punishment; and 4) a monetary incentive delay (MID) task in which participants tried to obtain or avoid rewards and losses of different magnitude. This dataset includes sociodemographic questionnaire data, anatomical, task-based fMRI, and corresponding behavioral task-based data. We outline several opportunities for extension and reuse, including exploration of individual differences, cross-task comparisons, and representational similarity analyses.