The behavioural assessment of savouring in schizotypal anhedonia: The Verbal Fluency Test of Enjoyable Experiences (VFTEE)

Hedonic response is abnormal in negative schizotypy. Using self-report methods, Applegate, El-Deredy, and Bentall (2009) reported that schizotypal anhedonia was associated with a poor capacity to savour, where savouring is the ability to mentally rehearse past, present and future pleasant experiences. A behavioural measure of savouring, the Verbal Fluency Test of Enjoyable Experiences (VFTEE), was developed, and reliability and validity were assessed. The VFTEE elicits memories and predictions of positive experiences, using ease of generation as an index of savouring ability. Sixty-seven students, who scored high and low on measures of negative schizotypy and hypomania, completed questionnaire measures of hedonic functioning. Evoked affect was assessed on four trials of the VFTEE and an incentivised card-sorting task. The VFTEE demonstrated good internal reliability. Correlation and regression analyses revealed stylistically different abnormalities in how hypomanic and negatively schizotypal groups savour behaviourally. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Hedonic processing in schizophrenia Recent reviews have challenged the assumption that anhedonia in negative symptom patients reflects an abnormal in-the-moment response to pleasurable stimuli (Burbridge & Barch, 2007; Kring & Moran, 2008). Research examining reactions of those with schizophrenia, their first degree relatives and those at high risk to pleasant pictures (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999), sounds (Bradley & Lang, 1999) faces, (Gur et al., 2001) and film clips (Gray, 2001; Gray, Braver, & Raichle, 2002) suggests instead that pleasure response in this group is principally intact, despite self-accounts to the contrary (Berenbaum & Oltmanns, 1992; Cohen & Minor, 2010; Earnst & Kring, 1999; Kring & Caponigro, 2010; Kring & Moran, 2008; Trémeau, 2006). An examination of hedonic response during stage-by-stage processing has led researchers to propose that it is the cognitive abnormalities associated with schizophrenia, such as reduction in working memory capacity, which explain the difference between actual and self-perceived emotional response (Trémeau et al., 2010). Pleasure can be parsed into distinct temporal stages, which correspond to anticipation, hedonia (immediate gratification) and hedonic memory in Trémeau’s model and anticipatory and consummatory pleasure in the work of Gard and colleagues (Gard, Germans-Gard, Kring, & John, 2006; Gard, Kring, Gard, Horan, & Green, 2007). By examining evoked response to unpleasant, pleasant and neutral pictures, Heerey and Gold (2007) noted that people with schizophrenia had difficulties translating immediate emotional experiences into appetitive action,which they attributed to a decoupling of affect from motivated activity, a theory known as the ‘pleasure disconnection hypothesis’. In support of this theory, positively valenced emotional memories drop their incentive salience over time in thosewith schizophrenia, so early emotional processing is unaffected but later processing is reduced (Herbener, Rosen, Khine, & Sweeney, 2007). A more recent study found that participants with negative schizophrenia reported comparable levels of anticipatory (appetitive) and online (present moment) pleasure, and greater levels of remembered pleasure than healthy controls (Trémeau et al., 2010). Intriguingly, ability to remember pleasure could predict translation into motivated action whereas directly experienced hedonia could not. Thus, one alternative explanation is that the anticipation, online experience and memory of pleasure is intact in those with schizophrenia, but systemic integration of ordinarily inter-connected affective information into motivational states at a later stage of processing is not (Becerril & Barch, 2010; Trémeau et al., 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.06.035 0191-8869/ 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (E. Applegate). Personality and Individual Differences 70 (2014) 145–149