Consistent with cross-species research suggesting that adversity can disrupt hedonic capacity as well as related neural circuit function (Anisman & Matheson, 2005; Rygula et al. 2005; Krishnan et al. 2007; Bogdan et al. 2011; Pechtel & Pizzagalli, 2011; Porcelli et al. 2012), stress-related psychopathology such as depression and substance use disorder is frequently characterized by both blunted reward-related corticostriatal circuit reactivity and anhedonia (Diekhof et al. 2008; Hopper et al. 2008; Sailer et al. 2008; Pizzagalli et al. 2009). By contrast, individuals characterized by positive affect and optimism have increased corticostriatal reactivity to positive stimuli (Sharot et al. 2007) and display more adaptive responses to stress (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004; Ong et al. 2006). Collectively, these data have led to speculation that robust reward-related neural circuit function may confer relative resilience to stress-related anhedonia and associated psychopathology (Feder et al. 2009); this theory has recently received empirical support in preclinical (Krishnan et al. 2007) and human (Nikolova et al. 2012) studies.
