Anhedonic
| Anhedonia | |
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| Pronunciation | |
| Specialty | Psychiatry |
| Classification | |
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| External resources |
Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable, e.g. exercise, hobbies, singing, sexual activities or social interactions. While earlier definitions of anhedonia emphasized pleasurable experience, more recent models have highlighted the need to consider different aspects of enjoyable behavior, such as motivation or desire to engage in activities (motivational anhedonia), as compared to the level of enjoyment of the activity itself ("consummatory anhedonia").
According to William James, the term was coined by Théodule-Armand Ribot.
One can distinguish many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. Professor Ribot proposed the name anhedonia to designate this condition. "The state of anhedonia, if I may coin a new word to pair off with analgesia," he writes, "has been very little studied, but it exists."
Anhedonia can be a characteristic of mental disorders, especially mood disorder. The word is from Greek: ἀν- an-, "without" and ἡδονή hēdonē, "pleasure".
Researchers theorize that anhedonia may result from the breakdown in the brain's reward system, involving the neurotransmitter dopamine. Studies by Paul Keedwell, MD, then of King's College, found that the brains of participants who were clinically depressed had to work harder to process rewarding experiences. While earlier research believed dopamine to be primarily involved in the subjective experience of pleasure, the last 20 years has seen a conceptual shift, such that dopamine is now believed to underlie various aspects of reward anticipation, learning, and motivation. Anhedonia can be characterised as "impaired ability to pursue, experience and/or learn about pleasure, which is often, but not always accessible to conscious awareness".
The conditions of Akinetic mutism and Negative symptoms are closely related. In Akinetic mutism a stroke or other lesion to the anterior cingulate cortex, causes reduction in movement (akinetic) and speech (mutism).
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