The Building Blocks Of Anticipatory Pleasure: Prospection, Memory & Imager

Anticipatory pleasure deficits have been recently documented in people with schizophrenia (Kring & Caponigro, 2010). However, less is known about the extent to which particular processes that support anticipatory pleasure, including memory, prospection, and imagery, are disrupted in schizophrenia. We asked 32 people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 29 people without schizophrenia to provide prospection narratives in response to positive, negative, and neutral event cues. Prior to prospection, participants provided personal memory narratives or completed a control task. When prompted with salient event cues, the content and experience of personal memories rendered by people with schizophrenia did not differ from those of controls. Further, people with and without schizophrenia reported similar vividness of mental imagery and their prospections varied by valence in similar ways. However, we found interesting group differences in the context and experience of prospections. Specifically, the prospections of people with schizophrenia included fewer time and place indicators, less sensory experience, and were less likely to reference the past than controls. Contrary to expectations, talking about personal memories before prospection didn't influence the content or manner of rendering prospections with one exception: People with schizophrenia reported experiencing less positive emotion when prospecting and less predicted positive emotion than controls if they completed the control task before prospection, but did not differ from controls in current or predicted positive emotion if they completed the personal memory task before prospection. Taken together, these findings suggest that whereas the ability to generate memories and rich vivid imagery appear intact in schizophrenia, difficulties in anticipatory pleasure may be related, in part, to difficulties in prospections, including drawing from the past.