Computational modelling of effort‐based decision‐making in depression: The role of apathy and anhedonia in adolescent girls
Ningning Zeng, Dongsheng Zhou, Jiali Zhou, Yaner Su, Guangzhi Deng, Junyi Zhang, Xiaoli Liu, André Aleman, Pengfei Xu, Yuejia Luo, Katharina S. GoerlichAbstract
Background
Adolescence is a period of heightened vulnerability to depression, particularly in females. Motivational deficits are a hallmark of depression, yet the cognitive mechanisms underlying impaired effort‐based decision‐making (EBDM) in female adolescents remain poorly understood. Computational psychiatry addresses this by fitting mathematical models to behavioural data and extracting latent parameters, offering a more mechanistic view.
Methods
This study used computational modelling to investigate the distinct effects of apathy and anhedonia on effort‐based decision‐making in adolescent girls with depression. Thirty‐two adolescent girls with depression and 33 matched healthy controls performed a physical effort‐based decision‐making task. Participants accepted or rejected to exert different levels of physical effort to obtain different magnitudes of rewards or to avoid loss. Group differences were analysed utilizing a hierarchical Bayesian discounting model.
Results
The depression group exhibited a significantly reduced willingness to exert effort to obtain rewards, reflected by a lower accept rate and longer response time compared to the healthy control group. In line with this, the discounting model showed that the depression group had a higher effort sensitivity. Moreover, in the healthy control group, higher apathy levels were associated with a lower accept rate, whereas no such associations were observed for anhedonia; in the depression group, no significant associations were found for either apathy or anhedonia.
Conclusions
This study identifies a computational signature of motivational deficits in female adolescent depression, characterized by oversensitivity to effort expenditure and modulated by apathy severity. By focusing on female adolescents, our findings highlight sex‐specific mechanisms underpinning vulnerability to depression.