Anhedonia and Emotion Regulation in Delay Discounting

Abstract

This study focused on two research questions. First, it examined how one’s low regard for future reward can influence one’s time-bound decision making also known as temporal decision making. Second, it examined how the control (i.e. emotion regulation) of negative emotion also influenced temporal discounting. The study hypothesizes that 1) low anticipatory wanting and 2) employing suppression and reappraisal predict discounting behavior. TEPS was used to measure anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia whereas the emotion regulation task and delay discounting task were adapted from previous experimental studies and appropriately designed using Superlab 5. The data were collected from participants composed of 206 and was analyzed using process macro SPSS version 21. The results failed to show that the proposed predictors were directly associated with discounting. The author resolved to conditional indirect process analysis using different models. The initial pathway modeling showed a conditional indirect effect of anticipatory anhedonia on delay discounting mediated by negative affect and moderated by suppression condition (template 14 in Haye's Process model in SPSS 2013). This project designed two readily available experiment materials. First, the emotion regulation tasks in inducing negative affect derived from Dan-Galusser and Gross (2011) using IAPS (Lang, 1998) wherein 75 photos will be shown to participants. The other one is the delay discounting task using Philippine peso currency which is derived according to Rachlin, Raineri & Gross’s (1991) method of titrating hypothetical monetary rewards until the indifference points are reached in each delay time points