The Psychometric Properties and Clinical Utility of Neural Measures of Reward Processing

Reward processing is implicated in the etiology of several psychological conditions including depressive disorders. In the current paper, we examined the psychometric properties of a neural measure of reward processing, the reward positivity (RewP), in 279 adult women at baseline and 187 women 8 weeks later. The RewP demonstrated excellent internal consistency at both timepoints and good test-retest reliability using estimates from both classical test theory and generalizability theory. Additionally, the difference between RewP following reward and loss feedback was marginally associated with depressive symptoms in a subsample of participants. We also examined the relationship between subject-level dependability estimates and depression severity, finding that depressive symptoms may contribute to lower dependability on reward trials. However, this finding did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and should be replicated in future studies. These findings support RewP as a useful measure of individual differences of reward processing and point to the potential utility of this measure for various forms of psychopathology.