Anhedonia in flux: Understanding the associations of emotion regulation and anxiety with anhedonia dynamics in a sample with major depressive disorder

Abstract

Negative rumination and emotion regulation difficulties have been consistently linked with depression. Despite anhedonia—the lack of interest in pleasurable experiences—being a cardinal symptom of depression, emotion regulation of positive emotions, including dampening, are considered far less in the literature. Given that anhedonia may manifest through blunted responses to previously positive or enjoyable experiences, it is vital to understand how different positive emotion regulation strategies impact anhedonia symptom severity and how it can vary or change over time. Moreover, understanding the detrimental or protective nature of positive emotion regulation on anhedonia can aid with future anhedonia-focused treatments. Therefore, the current study examined the temporal association between anhedonia dynamics and two different emotion rumination strate gies in response to positive emotions: dampening and positive rumination. Depressed persons (N = 137) completed baseline measures of positive emotion regulation, difficulties regulating negative emotions, and anxiety, and completed ecological momentary assessments three times per day for 90 days regarding their depressive symptoms, including anhedonia. We assessed baseline dampening and amplifying scores to predict anhedonia dynamics through four linear models with interactions. Providing partial support for our hypotheses, results indicate that amplifying positivity is positively associated with fluctuations, instability, and acute changes in anhedonia over the course of 90 days; however, neither dampening, difficulties regulating negative emotions, nor anxiety were related to anhedonia dynamics. The current findings suggest that amplifying positivity may be able to predict changes in anhedonia over time and should further be examined as a potential protective factor of anhedonia.