Behavioral mediators of stress-related mood symptoms in adolescence & young adulthood

Both unipolar and bipolar depression have been linked with impairments in executive functioning (EF). In particular, mood symptom severity is associated with differences in common EF, a latent measure of general EF abilities. The relationship between mood disorders and EF is particularly salient in adolescence and young adulthood when the ongoing development of EF intersects with a higher risk of mood disorder onset. However, it remains unclear if common EF impairments have associations with specific symptom dimensions of mood pathology such as blunted positive affect, mood instability, or physiological arousal, or if differences in common EF more broadly relate to what is shared across various symptom domains, such as general negative affect or distress. To address this question, bifactor models can be applied to simultaneously examine the shared and unique contributions of particular mood symptom dimensions. However, no studies to our knowledge have examined bifactor models of mood symptoms in relation to measures of common EF. This study examined associations between common EF and general vs. specific symptom dimensions (anhedonia, physiological arousal, and mania) using structural equation modeling in adolescents and young adults with varying severity of mood symptoms (n = 495, ages = 13–25 years, 68.69% female). A General Depression factor capturing shared variance across symptoms statistically predicted lower Common EF. Additionally, a factor specific to physiological arousal was associated with lower Common EF. Anhedonia-specific and Mania-specific factors were not significantly related to Common EF. Altogether, these results indicate that deficits in common EF are driven by, or reflect, general features of mood pathology that are shared across symptom dimensions but are also specifically associated with physiological arousal.

Anhedonia is a lack or loss of pleasure in daily life and is common across many mental health disorders (i.e., transdiagnostic). This is the first systematic review to investigate: 1) How is anhedonia conceptualized and explicitly measured using experience sampling methodology (ESM) in psychiatry and mental health?; 2) What is the experience of anhedonia in daily life at the between-person level and at the within-person level?; and 3) What is the quality of reporting in ESM studies assessing anhedonia in daily life? We searched PsychARTICLES, MEDLINE, Psychology Databases, EMBASE, Web of Science Core Collection, and Europe PMC (last search 6th May 2024). We identified 102 unique articles that satisfied inclusion criteria (i.e., assessed anhedonia via ESM). Anhedonia was typically conceptualized in terms of diminished pleasure, enjoyment, or liking, with emphasis on consummatory rather than anticipatory experiences. Measurement was heterogeneous and approaches differed across mental health research traditions. Anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia were present in samples that experienced mental health symptoms or diagnoses (between-person) and varied across different daily contexts and across time (within-person). Compliance with a composite reporting quality assessment tool for ESM studies was generally low. Results suggest that there is benefit in exploring anhedonia in daily life from a transdiagnostic perspective to identify whether different components of anhedonia relate to one another in a similar way across disorders. Future research would benefit from standardized and validated ESM items of anhedonia, exploration of moment-to-moment changes over shorter time-scales, and increased transparency in methodological reporting.

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