Received: 8 October 2016 Revised: 12 January 2017 Accepted: 19 January 2017 DOI 10.1111/eip.12439 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Attenuated positive psychotic symptoms and the experience of anhedonia Shanna Cooper1 | Ann M. Kring2 | Lauren M. Ellman1 1Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Background: Deficits in anticipatory pleasure have been consistently shown among chronic, 2Department of Psychology, University of first-episode, and clinical high risk for psychosis populations, but much less attention has been California, Berkeley, California given to non-clinical individuals experiencing attenuated positive psychotic symptoms (APPS). Correspondence Methods: Young adults (N = 1839) were administered the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Lauren M. Ellman, Temple University, Scale, which measures anticipatory and consummatory pleasure, and the Prodromal Question- Department of Psychology, 1701 North 13th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA. naire, which measures APPS. Analyses examined (1) total APPS endorsed and (2) comparisons Email:
[email protected] of groups experiencing APPS that were endorsed as distressing (distressing APPS = D-APPS; Funding information experiencing more D-APPS = high-D-APPS, a potentially more clinically meaningful group; National Institute of Mental Health, Grant/ experiencing fewer D-APPS = low-D-APPS). Award number: R01MH096478; Start-up Results: Results indicated that anticipatory, but not consummatory, pleasure deficits were associ- award Temple University; College of Liberal Arts Research Award from Temple University. ated with elevated APPS. Additionally, the high-D-APPS group exhibited significantly less anticipa- tory pleasure compared with the low-D-APPS group, but did not differ in consummatory pleasure. Conclusion: Our results mirror findings in schizophrenia samples and suggest that anticipatory pleasure deficits occur along the entire continuum of psychotic experiences.