Response to Gooding and Plfum, 'The nature of diminished pleasure in individuals at risk for or affected by schizophrenia'. Anticipatory and consummatory pleasure deficits across the schizophrenia spectrum.

摘要

We consider the results of the study by Gooding and Pflum (2012) an important extension of previous research on anticipatory and con-summatory pleasure in schizophrenia, as these findings help to clarify that medication and severity of psychosis may not explain contradictory findings of studies using the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS: Gard et al., 2006) in schizophrenia. One notable finding that is emerging regarding the TEPS is the importance of control group data. To illustrate this point, Table 1 presents published means on the TEPS Anticipatory (ANT) and Consummatory (CON) subscales from Gard et al. (2007), Strauss et al. (2011), and Gooding and Pflum (2012). As can be seen in the table, there is considerable variability in control TEPS-ANT and TEPS-CON scores among these studies. Variability in control scores should be taken into account in future TEPS studies -it is likely that self-reported anticipatory and consummatory pleasure differs among healthy individuals of different ages, gender, and ethnic groups and that such demographic factors determine how individuals respond to individual items (e.g.,"When I'm on my way to an amusement park, I can hardly wait to ride the roller coaster"). Demographic characteristics may therefore influence whether differences are found between schizophrenia-spectrum and control samples on the individual subscales.