Diminished ascending drive in transdiagnostic anhedonia shifts the cortico-subcortical hierarchy away from bottom-up dominance
- 1Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Abstract
Anhedonia, the diminished capacity to experience or pursue pleasure, is a core feature of mood and psychotic disorders, yet the large-scale brain dynamics underlying it remain uncharacterized. Dominant accounts posit striatal hypofunction with compensatory prefrontal over-recruitment, but they rest on activation magnitudes and symmetric correlations, which cannot resolve the direction of influence. Here, in 210 adults from the Transdiagnostic Connectome Project, we defined symptom-derived low- and high-anhedonia subgroups and estimated each participant's directed effective connectivity using a whole-brain generative model fitted to resting-state fMRI. In high anhedonia, the cortex shifted upstream relative to the subcortex, flattening the cortico-subcortical hierarchy. Correspondingly, the net balance of direct cortico-subcortical flow shifted from bottom-up to balanced. This shift recurred within the frontostriatal reward circuit and replicated across independent halves of each participant's data. Flow asymmetry also increased with subject-level severity. Decomposing flow into ascending and descending arms showed that both weakened in high anhedonia, but ascending subcortex-to-cortex and striatum-to-prefrontal drive fell more than the descending drive. These findings identify a reorganization of cortico-subcortical hierarchy in anhedonia and suggest that the previously reported prefrontal over-recruitment reflects diminished ascending drive rather than stronger cortical output.
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BibTeX
@misc{roghani2026diminished,
title = {{Diminished ascending drive in transdiagnostic anhedonia shifts the cortico-subcortical hierarchy away from bottom-up dominance}},
author = {P. Roghani and J. Vohryzek and M. L. Kringelbach and G. Deco},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.12.758297},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.12.758297v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Diminished ascending drive in transdiagnostic anhedonia shifts the cortico-subcortical hierarchy away from bottom-up dominance
AU - P. Roghani
AU - J. Vohryzek
AU - M. L. Kringelbach
AU - G. Deco
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.12.758297
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.12.758297v1
AB - Anhedonia, the diminished capacity to experience or pursue pleasure, is a core feature of mood and psychotic disorders, yet the large-scale brain dynamics underlying it remain uncharacterized. Dominant accounts posit striatal hypofunction with compensatory prefrontal over-recruitment, but they rest on activation magnitudes and symmetric correlations, which cannot resolve the direction of influence. Here, in 210 adults from the Transdiagnostic Connectome Project, we defined symptom-derived low- and high-anhedonia subgroups and estimated each participant's directed effective connectivity using a whole-brain generative model fitted to resting-state fMRI. In high anhedonia, the cortex shifted upstream relative to the subcortex, flattening the cortico-subcortical hierarchy. Correspondingly, the net balance of direct cortico-subcortical flow shifted from bottom-up to balanced. This shift recurred within the frontostriatal reward circuit and replicated across independent halves of each participant's data. Flow asymmetry also increased with subject-level severity. Decomposing flow into ascending and descending arms showed that both weakened in high anhedonia, but ascending subcortex-to-cortex and striatum-to-prefrontal drive fell more than the descending drive. These findings identify a reorganization of cortico-subcortical hierarchy in anhedonia and suggest that the previously reported prefrontal over-recruitment reflects diminished ascending drive rather than stronger cortical output.
ER -