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Anhedonia

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Impaired ability to experience desire; Impaired ability to experience pleasure; Impaired ability to learn from rewards; Impaired ability to pursue rewards; Impaired hedonic impact

Definition

Anhedonia was originally defined by Ribot (1896) as the inability to experience pleasure. However, following progress in affective neuroscience, the term has been reconceptualized to reflect impairments in subcomponents of reward processing. Treadway and Zald (2011) parse anhedonia into motivational, consummatory, and decisional subtypes of anhedonia. In the same vein, Rømer Thomsen et al. (2015; Rømer Thomsen 2015) differentiate between impairments in the ability to pursue, experience, and learn about reward.

Introduction

Ribot (1896) defined anhedonia as the inability to experience pleasuremore than a century ago, and until recently, this definition has been widely accepted. However, during the past 5 years, this definition has been subject to debate following progress in affective...

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Centre for Alcohol and Drug Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Kristine Rømer Thomsen

Authors
  1. Kristine Rømer Thomsen
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Correspondence to Kristine Rømer Thomsen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Lodz, Smugowa 10/12, 91-433, Lodz, Poland

    Monika Wróbel

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Thomsen, K.R. (2016). Anhedonia. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_485-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_485-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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