Revisiting Social Anhedonia: Beyond Monolithic Assessments and Interventions

Abstract

Social anhedonia, the inability to experience social pleasure, is a transdiagnostic symptom. Current research on social anhedonia adopts a monolithic approach to evaluate and treat this complex symptom. In this article, we reconceptualize social anhedonia using a triune framework encompassing functional, ecological, and ethological validity. This framework can better guide the future development of assessment tools and interventions. Moreover, it addresses the online-versus-offline, contextualized-versus-decontextualized aspects of social anhedonia in the digital era. We argue that future assessment tools should adopt virtual reality and multimodal data-collection platforms. Personalized, dimension-specific interventions are likely to be more effective. Our timely revisit paves ways for more sophisticated, context-sensitive evaluations and interventions for social anhedonia.

Keywords

social anhedonia digital era validity virtual reality artificial intelligence

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