UCLA

Anhedonia, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities, characterizes many individuals suffering from depression. The majority of therapeutic interventions are designed to decrease negative affect and are largely ineffective for reducing anhedonia. Treatments can be improved by targeting processes thought to underlie anhedonia, such as diminished positive affect, overgeneral autobiographical memory, less detailed mental imagery, and bias for use of third- vs. first-person perspective when recalling events. To this aim, Positive Affect Treatment (PAT; Study 1) and Mobile Virtual Reality-Reward Training (MVR-RT; Study 2) include autobiographical memory specificity training via “imaginal recounting,” which involves guided visualization of pleasant experiences with a focus on specific positive sensations, thoughts, and emotions using first-person perspective and present tense. The primary aim of this dissertation was to investigate features of imaginal recounting that enhance positive affect. Drawing from trials of PAT and MVR-RT, Studies 1 and 2 used linguistic analysis of treatment sessions to examine whether features of imaginal recounting (emotional tone, first-person perspective, perception words, episodic detail) changed across sessions and whether changes corresponded with symptom improvements. In PAT, there were no changes in linguistic features across sessions, whereas in MVR-RT, emotional tone became increasingly positive and contained more perception words. The relationship between linguistic features and clinical outcomes was mixed and varied between treatments. Because the first two studies were correlational in nature, a third experimental study compared the impact of experiential processing (focusing on sensations) versus analytical processing (thinking conceptually) among participants with anhedonia who were asked to recall positive autobiographical memories and imagine future events. In addition to positive and negative affect, additional outcomes included dampening appraisals (which serve to diminish positive affect) and meaning. Compared to analytical processing, experiential processing led to greater positive affect, less negative affect, less dampening, and marginally greater meaning. Overall, these studies suggest that clinical interventions that encourage experiential savoring of pleasant sensations can enhance positive affect for individuals with anhedonia.