Prospective Associations Between Early Adolescent Reward Functioning and Later Dimensions of Psychopathology

Individual differences in reward functioning have been associated with numerous disorders in adolescence. Given relations with multiple forms of psychopathology, it is unclear whether these associations are disorder specific or reflective of shared variance across multiple disorders. In a sample of adolescents (N = 418), we examined associations between neural and self-reported indices of early reward functioning (age 12) with different levels of a hierarchical psychopathology model assessed later in adolescence (age 18). We examined whether prospective relationships between reward functioning are specific to individual disorders or better explained by transdiagnostic dimensions. We found modest results for prospective associations between reward indices and different dimensions of psychopathology, with most significant associations not surviving correction for multiple comparisons. We discuss the benefits and limitations of the modeling approach used to examine dimension-specific associations that future work can build on. Overall, more work is needed to better understand how reward functioning is specifically associated with different forms of and hierarchical levels of psychopathology.