The thrill of victory: Savoring positive affect, psychophysiological reward processing, and symptoms of depression

Depression is characterized by a pattern of maladaptive emotion regulation. Recently, researchers have begun to focus on associations between depression and two positive affect regulation strategies: savoring and dampening. Savoring, or upregulation of positive affect, is positively associated with well-being and negatively associated with depression, whereas dampening, or downregulation of positive affect, is positively associated with depression, anhedonia, and negative affect. To date, no research has examined whether savoring or dampening can affect neurophysiological reactivity to reward, which previous research has shown is associated with symptoms of depression. Here, we examined associations between psychophysiological reward processing-primarily captured by the Reward Positivity (RewP), an event-related potential (ERP) deflection elicited by feedback indicating reward (vs. nonreward)-positive affect regulation strategies, and symptoms of depression. One hundred undergraduates completed questionnaires assessing affect, emotion regulation, and depressive symptoms and completed a computerized guessing task, once before and again after being randomly assigned to emotion-regulation strategy conditions. Results indicate that (a) the relationship between RewP amplitude and depressive symptoms may, in part, depend upon positive affect regulation strategies and (b) the RewP elicited by reward appears sensitive to a savoring intervention. These findings suggest that mitigating depressive symptoms in emerging adults may depend on both top-down (i.e., savoring) and bottom-up (i.e., RewP) forms of positive affect regulation and have important implications for clinical prevention and intervention efforts for depressive symptoms and disorder. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).