Reward-Related Brain Activity Mediates the Relationship Between Decision-Making Deficits and Pediatric Depression Symptom Severity.

ABSTRACT:

Background

The mechanisms that link neural and behavioral indices of reduced reward sensitivity in depression, particularly in children, remain unclear. Reward positivity (RewP), a neural index of reward processing, has been consistently associated with depression. Separately, recent studies using the drift-diffusion model on behavioral data have delineated computational indices of reward sensitivity. Therefore, in the current study, we examined whether RewP is a neural mediator of drift-diffusion model-based indices of reward processing in predicting pediatric depression across varying levels of symptom severity.

Methods

A community sample of 166 girls, ages 8 to 14 years, completed 2 tasks. The first was a reward guessing task from which RewP was computed using electroence

SUBMITTER: Pitliya RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11669731 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature