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

Anticipatory pleasure is a positive affective state in response to a mental representation of a future event. In cognitive neuroscience, anticipatory pleasure is discussed as a central motivational mechanism that is related to goal-directed behavior. This project investigates whether people with negative symptoms of psychotic disorders show lower quantity (e.g. frequency) and quality (e.g. less lively / detailed) of mental representations of positive events than healthy controls. In addition, this study investigates whether these differences are related to reduced anticipatory pleasure in people with negative symptoms. We will recruit 43 subjects with psychotic disorder and at least mild negative symptoms and 43 demographically matched non-psychotic 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 be asked to answer structured interviews and questionnaires about their mental health, which are supplemented by well established and validated scales to assess positive mental representations. Following baseline, subjects will participate in one week ecological momentary assessment of anticipatory pleasure and goal-directed activity in daily-life. We will carry out quantitative data analyses. These includes testing for group differences using multifactorial variance analyzes and examining correlative relationships using linear regression and multilevel models. We expect that subjects with negative symptoms will report quantitatively and qualitatively less positive mental representations than the control group and that positive mental representations will show positive associations with anticipatory pleasure and negative associations with negative motivational symptoms.