(PS2-91) Anhedonia and Episodic Future Thinking: Investigating the Moderating Role of Mood

Episodic future thinking, or our ability to simulate personal future events, is implicated in a range of important functioning from problem solving to emotion regulation. However, individuals with clinical diagnoses like depression and schizophrenia often struggle to produce future thinking that is vivid and detailed. This transdiagnostic deficits remain poorly understood. Primary analyses reveal that greater anhedonia severity is related to less vivid mental imagery. The goal of this study was to examine the moderating role of emotion valence on future thinking imagery. A mixed sample (N = 65) of undergraduate students and community adults completed a two-day experimental study. Participants completed two episodic future thinking tasks in which they were prompted to generated12 specific future thinking narratives of different emotional valance (positive, negative, neutral). After generating each future event story, participants completed a brief questionnaire in which they rated the vividness of their event and their positive and negative affect in-the-moment of generation. In multilevel models controlling for age and gender, we assessed the effects of anhedonia and emotion valance on cue prompt on subjective vividness. In two additional models, we assessed the effect of anhedonia on in-the-moment positive and negative affect. Greater anhedonia severity predicted reduced subjective vividness (p < 0.001, d= -0.75). In a follow-up exploratory analysis, we included depression as a covariate; anhedonia remained a significant predictor over and above depression (p= .005, d= -0.75) while depression itself was not a significant predictor. Future thinking that was generated form negative cue prompts was less vivid compared to those from neutral and positive prompts (p < 0.001, d= -2.03). Finally, anhedonic symptom severity predicted in-the-moment positive mood, but not negative mood, during narrative generation such that greater severity was associated with lower ratings across all (positive, negative, and neutral) cue prompts (p= 0.034, d= 0.61). While replication is warranted, this result provides preliminary evidence for the unique role of anhedonia in observed memory and future thinking deficits related to mental imagery observed across psychiatric diagnoses. Anhedonia severity also predicted individual differences in positive, but not negative, affect during our future thinking task, providing further evidence for the delineation of the positive and negative affect systems, and identifies anhedonia as being uniquely related to positive affect.