Past-year relational victimization is associated with a blunted neural response to rewards in emerging adults

Abstract

Anhedonia is associated with multiple forms of psychopathology, yet relatively, little is known about how anhedonia develops. Emerging evidence suggests that anhedonia is the result of interactions between life stress and the brain's reward systems, and that social stress, in particular, may drive these processes. One potent form of social stress is peer victimization, but very little research has focused on peer victimization beyond adolescence, and even less has examined the associations between peer victimization and neural response to rewards. The present study sought to identify associations between past-year history of peer victimization and neural response to rewards in emerging adults (N = 61). Relational and physical forms of victimization were assessed separately since these distinct types of social stress have different trajectories across development and different associations with psychopathology. Reward sensitivity was indexed with the event-related potential component known as the reward positivity, which was elicited using a forced-choice monetary reward guessing task. Results demonstrated that past-year relational, but not physical, victimization was associated with a blunted neural response to rewards. These findings provide insight into one potential mechanism in the etiology of anhedonia, which may, in turn, help us to better identify pathways to multiple psychopathologies.

Fig. 1

Partial regression plots depicting associations between the RewP (measured at a pooling of Cz, FC1 and FC2) and relational and physical forms of peer victimization, controlling for the other independent variables entered into the regression model (Table 2; neural response to losses, gender and the alternate type of victimization).

Fig. 2

Waveforms and scalp topographies depicting neural response to gain and loss feedback at a pooling of electrodes Cz, FC1 and FC2, in participants high and low on past-year relational victimization based on a median split. Shaded bars demarcate the 250–350 ms time window used for analysis. Scalp topographies show Δ RewP (gain minus loss).