Anhedonia, encompassing a broad spectrum of deficits in reward processing, is highly prevalent in major depressive disorder (MDD) and constitutes one of its core symptoms. While substantial progress has recently been made in mapping neuropsychiatric symptoms to specific brain networks, focused efforts to examine network localization of anhedonia are limited. We initially synthesized extant neuroimaging literature to identify brain locations with structural or functional alterations related to anhedonia. By integrating these affected brain locations with large-scale discovery (1113 healthy individuals) and validation (1093 healthy individuals and 255 MDD patients) resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets, we then applied novel functional connectivity network mapping to construct an anhedonia network. The anhedonia network was composed of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, insula, lateral prefrontal cortex, and striatum, principally implicating the canonical ventral attention and subcortical networks. Further analyses revealed that the trait and state anhedonia networks preferentially involved the default and limbic networks respectively, in addition to the commonly affected ventral attention and subcortical networks. Our findings may not only advance the understanding of the neurobiology underlying anhedonia from a network perspective, but also potentially contribute to more targeted and effective intervention strategies for anhedonia.

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethics approval and consent to participate: The original studies providing the HCP, AMUD, and MDD datasets received ethical approval from the relevant Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) or ethics committees. Specifically, the HCP study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA, and written informed consent was obtained from each participant. All participants in the AMUD and MDD datasets provided informed consent under protocols approved by The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University. The datasets utilized in this study were anonymized to ensure participant confidentiality, containing no protected health information or personally identifiable images. All procedures involving human participants were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations, in compliance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable standards.