Mental imagery use and it‘s relationship with anhedonia in psychosis. An experience sampling study

Anticipatory pleasure is a positive affect state in response to a mental representation of a future event. In cognitive neuroscience, anticipatory pleasure is discussed as a key motivational mechanism driving goal-directed behavior. This project will investigate whether people with negative symptoms of psychotic disorders show lower quantity (e.g. frequency) and quality (e.g. less vividness / detailedness) of mental representations of positive events than healthy controls. Moreover, we aim to investigate whether these differences are related to reduced anticipatory pleasure in people with negative symptoms. We will recruit 43 subjects with psychotic disorders and at least mild negative symptoms and 43 demographically matched healthy controls at the Psychotherapeutic University Outpatient Clinic of Universität Hamburg and the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin. At baseline, participants will answer structured interviews and questionnaires to assess mental health and the quantity and quality of mental imagery use. Following baseline assessment, participants will answer one week ecological momentary assessment of anticipatory pleasure and goal-directed activity in daily-life. We will carry out quantitative data analyses. These include testing for group differences using multifactorial variance analyzes and examining correlative relationships using linear regression and multilevel models. We expect that participants with negative symptoms will report quantitatively and qualitatively less positive mental representations than participants in the control group. We also expect that positive mental representations will show positive associations with anticipatory pleasure and negative associations with motivational symptoms.