Translational Assessments of Reward and Anhedonia: A Tribute to Athina Markou

Abstract

Loss of pleasure (clinically referred to as anhedonia), impairments in other reward-related processes such as reward learning, motivation, and reward valuation, and blunted affect characterize several mood and other psychiatric disorders. Despite the availability of many therapeutic options for these disorders, reward-related impairments remain challenging to treat and often persist despite alleviation of other symptoms. Lack of animal models of reward-related impairments and affect that have high construct and predictive validity is a key obstacle to developing novel treatments. This review highlights 1) guidelines to consider when developing translatable animal models; and 2) recent efforts to develop new reward-related assessments in humans and nonhuman animals that have been translated or back-translated from one species to another. The procedures described in this review are used to assess aspects of reward learning, motivated behavior, reward valuation, and affect. In several cases, researchers have attempted to implement task parameters that are as identical as possible to the parallel parameters used in existing cross-species tasks, with the goal of improving the translation of preclinical drug discovery findings to the clinic. In this regard, Dr. Athina Markou, who worked tirelessly throughout her career to understand and treat reward-related impairments across several psychiatric disorders, had great influence on conceptualizing the development and use of translational animal models of reward-related processes.

Keywords: Cross-species; Motivation; Pleasure; Positive valence systems; RDoC; Reward.