This page was translated automatically from Turkish. Read the original

This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

SO421

Musical reward as a window into anhedonia: a transdiagnostic perspective

MUSICAL REWARD AS A WINDOW INTO ANHEDONIA: A TRANSDIAGNOSTIC PERSPECTIVE

Musical reward appears to function as a partially dissociable domain of reward processing, calling into question the definition of anhedonia as a global loss of reward.

The aim is to question the traditional definition of anhedonia in major depressive disorder (MDD) as a global impairment in reward processing and to evaluate whether music, a powerful natural reward, can serve as a model for examining dissociations within reward processing. The method is a narrative review of neuroimaging and behavioral studies addressing reward responses to music in MDD, the dissociation between subjective and neural responses, specific musical anhedonia in healthy individuals, and music-based interventions for depression. Neuroimaging findings indicate that, in MDD, the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) response to preferred music is reduced and cannot be sustained over time. However, some studies have reported that subjective emotional experience remains intact despite altered neural responses, indicating a dissociation between the experiential and neurobiological components of reward. Individuals with specific musical anhedonia show reduced sensitivity to musical reward and weaker connectivity between the auditory cortex and the ventral striatum, while their responses to other rewards, such as money, remain normal; this supports the existence of partially distinct reward pathways. Meta-analytic data suggest that music-based interventions can reduce depressive symptoms, and the forest plot in the poster indicates moderate-certainty evidence for clinician-rated and self-reported depression and low-certainty evidence for anxiety and functioning. In conclusion, musical reward may be considered both an experimental probe for investigating reward dysfunction and a potential therapeutic target.

All WCP 2026 summaries