Motivation and Pleasure Domain Links to Social Function in College Students: A Network Analysis

Evidence suggests that the motivation and pleasure deficit of negative symptoms determines the social functioning in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Alexithymia is defined as the diminished ability to identify and describe emotion feelings, and influences patients' social functioning. However, little is known regarding the relationship between motivation and pleasure, alexithymia, and social functioning in nonclinical populations. This network analysis study aimed to investigate the interactions between motivation and pleasure, alexithymia and social functioning in a sample of 2889 college students. The flow network and item-level regularized partial correlation network were constructed. Centrality estimation and relative importance metrics were also estimated. The network structures between subgroups with high and low social anhedonia were compared. Our resultant networks showed that the motivation factor was closely connected with social functioning. The relative importance analysis found that, among other nodes, the motivation factor accounted for the highest proportion of variance of social functioning in the nonclinical sample. Although the two subgroups with high and low social anhedonia differed significantly in network structures, they generally shared a similar edge structure. The two subgroups only exhibited significant difference in the connection between the social pleasure factor and recreation/work pleasure factor of the motivation and pleasure. Our findings supported the important role of the motivation factor in determining social functioning in nonclinical population.