Please read Dr. Cohen’s article in Psychological Medicine titled, “Major depression symptom severity associations with willingness to exert effort and patch foraging strategy.“
Individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) can experience challenges with goal-directed behavior, including reduced motivation due to symptoms such as apathy, anergia, and anhedonia, as well as reduced cognitive function. Decisions about which goals to pursue and which actions to take to achieve them, can be understood in terms of costs and benefits. People maximize ‘expected value’ by selecting actions that maximize potential reward while minimizing associated costs. Effort-based decision making involves minimizing cognitive and physical effort costs, as well as the opportunity cost of time (often also emphasized in value-based decision-making, Constantino & Daw).
Under effort- and value-based decision-making disruption accounts of MDD symptoms, changes in goal-directed behavior in depression can come from multiple causes, for example, differences in representing either the benefits or the costs of potential actions. The present study focuses on cognitive and physical effort costs, as well as opportunity costs (i.e. reward rate), to understand how differences in these components of goal-directed behavior relate to clinical features of MDD. To read the full article.
Major depression symptom severity associations with willingness to exert effort and patch foraging strategy. Bustamante LA, Barch DM, Solis J, Oshinowo T, Grahek I, Konova AB, Daw ND, Cohen JD. Psychol Med. 2024 Dec 2:1-12. PMID: 39618329 DOI: 1017/S0033291724002691