SynthesisBiological psychiatry2021
Great Expectations: A Critical Review of and Suggestions for the Study of Reward Processing as a Cause and Predictor of Depression.
Synthesis in Biological psychiatry, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 47 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
47 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Pro-dopaminergic pharmacological interventions for anhedonia in depression: a living systematic review and network meta-analysis of human and animal studies.EBioMedicine · 2025Pooled it
- Annual Research Review: What processes are dysregulated among emotionally dysregulated youth? - a systematic review.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Pooled it
- Identifying transdiagnostically relevant risk and protective factors for internalizing psychopathology: An umbrella review of longitudinal meta-analyses.Journal of psychiatric research · 2023Pooled it
- The role of reward-related brain activity in response to treatment and later depression severity: data from a randomized controlled trial in early adolescents with anxiety disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2025Trial
- A pilot randomized controlled trial of a brief intervention targeting positive valence systems function to prevent internalizing symptoms in college students.Journal of consulting and clinical psychology · 2025Trial
- Targeting positive valence systems function in children of mothers with depressive symptoms: A pilot randomized trial of an RDoC-Informed preventive intervention.Behaviour research and therapy · 2023Trial
- Reduced anhedonia following internet-based cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression is mediated by enhanced reward circuit activation.Psychological medicine · 2023Trial
- Adolescents' ventral striatal reward neural activity moderates the association between lifetime trauma exposure and lower depression after 6 months.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2026Article
- Directionality of longitudinal associations between frontostriatal structural connectivity and depressive symptoms in adolescent girls.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Decisional reference point pathology: A cognitive mechanism for and a correlate of major depressive disorder in humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Reward-Related Brain Function as an Endophenotype in the Mood-Psychosis Spectrum.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Gone fishin'… for distinct patterns of belief-updating in late-life worry and rumination.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Altered dynamic functional connectivity characteristics in adolescent depression with childhood trauma: a pilot resting-state EEG study.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Characterizing Transdiagnostic Processes Underlying the Drive to Socially Engage: A Multimeasurement Factor Analytic Investigation.JAACAP open · 2025Article
- Triggering just-in-time adaptive interventions based on real-time detection of daily-life stress: Methodological development and longitudinal multicenter evaluation.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Blunted Ventral Striatal Reactivity to Social Reward Is Associated with More Severe Motivation and Pleasure Deficits in Psychosis.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- Dopamine D1 receptor agonist alleviates post-weaning isolation-induced neuroinflammation and depression-like behaviors in female mice.Behavioral and brain functions : BBF · 2025Article
- Investigating depression pathways in a clinical sample: childhood adversity, reward, and threat processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Ventral striatal-cingulate resting-state functional connectivity in healthy adolescents relates to later depression symptoms in adulthood.Journal of affective disorders · 2024Article
- Illuminating Hypomania in Early Adolescence: Associations Between Dark-Side and Bright-Side Hypomania, Insomnia, and Health-Related Quality of Life.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
13 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Both human and animal studies support the relationship between depression and reward processing abnormalities, giving rise to the expectation that neural signals of these processes may serve as biomarkers or mechanistic treatment targets. Given the great promise of this research line, we scrutinized those findings and the theoretical claims that underlie them. To achieve this, we applied the framework provided by classical work on causality as well as contemporary approaches to prediction. We identified a number of conceptual, practical, and analytical challenges to this line of research and used a preregistered meta-analysis to quantify the longitudinal associations between reward processing abnormalities and depression. We also investigated the impact of measurement error on reported data. We found that reward processing abnormalities do not reach levels that would be useful for clinical prediction, yet the available evidence does not preclude a possible causal role in depression.
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What Socratic holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.