Low reward responsiveness as a moderator of chronic stress effects on depressive symptoms in adolescents: An examination of monetary and social rewards

Exposure to stressors is a known risk factor for depression. Not all who experience stress develop depression, raising questions about vulnerabilities. Low neural reward responsiveness may be a vulnerability for depression in combination with stress. Research has primarily focused on responses to monetary rewards. Additional work is needed examining reward responsiveness across domains to investigate where patterns potentially diverge in understanding vulnerabilities for depression. To address this gap, we compared interactive effects between chronic stress and neural responses to monetary and social reward on depressive symptoms, covarying for sex. Adolescents between 14 and 17 years (N = 165), oversampled for current depression and maternal depression, completed simulated peer interaction and monetary reward tasks while electroencephalography data were recorded to measure the reward positivity (RewP) event-related potential. Chronic stress over the past 6 months was assessed using the UCLA Life Stress Interview. Participants completed a self-report measure of depressive symptoms. In separate models for each measure of reward responsiveness, chronic stress interacted with monetary (p = .020) and social (p = .002) RewP, such that chronic stress was more strongly associated with depressive symptoms for adolescents with relatively blunted reward responsiveness. In a model including both measures of reward responsiveness, the chronic stress interaction with social but not monetary RewP was significant (p = .041). These results support the role of reward responsiveness in shaping responses to stress, and the present study expands the literature by extending monetary reward research to the social domain.