Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Neural Responses to Reward: A Quasi-experiment.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a prolonged period of stress due to social isolation, illness, death, and other major life disruptions. Neural reward sensitivity, essential for healthy functioning, may become reduced under major naturalistic stressors, though few studies have examined this. The present study sought to test whether neural responses to rewards were significantly blunted by the stress of the pandemic.

Methods

We compared 2 groups of young adult participants, who completed a monetary reward task while an electroencephalogram was recorded, at 2 time points, 1 to 3 years apart. Our measure of reward sensitivity was the reward positivity (RewP), a neural marker enhanced to gain relative to loss feedback. The magnitude of the RewP is sensitive to stress ex

SUBMITTER: Freeman C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10028216 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature