Neural response to rewarding social feedback in never-depressed adolescent girls and their mothers with remitted depression: Associations with multiple risk indices.

Prevention of depression requires a clear understanding of etiology. Previous studies have identified reduced neural responses to monetary reward as a risk factor for depression, but social reward processing may be particularly relevant to depression. This study investigated associations between neural responses to social reward and three well-established risk factors for depression: personal history, family history, and interpersonal stress. We examined the reward positivity (RewP), an event-related potential sensitive to rewarding feedback, in a sample of 85 women with and without remitted depression and their never-depressed adolescent daughters. In never-depressed daughters, maternal history of depression predicted a blunted social RewP, but interpersonal stress did not. In the mothers, greater interpersonal stress predicted a blunted RewP, but personal depression history was not significant. Combined, these data suggest that personal history, family history, and interpersonal stress may converge on social reward sensitivity, which may advance future research to understand the development of depression. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).