Effective connectome-based predictive modeling reveals transdiagnostic heterogeneity of anhedonia from shared hubs to...

Anhedonia, a core transdiagnostic symptom of psychiatric disorders, is commonly dissociated into anticipatory (AP) and consummatory (CP) components. However, their patterns of divergence and convergence at the effective connectome level, and their association with cross-diagnostic pathological states, remain unclear. We utilized a cross-diagnostic sample (N = 218) to construct the Neural Perturbational Inference Effective Connectome-based Predictive Model (NPI-ECPM) to predict individual differences in AP and CP. Spatial co-localization analysis was conducted to quantify the topological overlap between the anhedonia-specific networks and the cross-diagnostic pathology network. Only anticipatory pleasure (AP) demonstrated significant differences between patients and healthy controls, whereas consummatory pleasure (CP) did not. The NPI-ECPM successfully predicted CP but failed to reliably predict AP. Notably, the AP-related network exhibited significant spatial convergence with the cross-diagnostic pathology network (ρ = 0.227, p < 0.001), suggesting meaningful spatial alignment with disease-related circuitry. These converging findings reveal a dual mechanism of anhedonia, in which AP corresponds to a state-dependent dysfunction linked to illness and CP reflects a diagnosis-independent trait. This framework clarifies the heterogeneity of anhedonia and supports a more precise mapping between symptom-specific and transdiagnostic neural features.