Anticipated emotion refers to an individual's predicted emotion prior to the occurrence of a future event and it influences decision making, motivation, and goal-directed behaviour. Previous literature has suggested that individuals may predict anticipated emotion differently for future social and non-social events.

Accumulated evidence suggests that anticipated emotion is closely associated with anhedonia and amotivation. Individuals with schizophrenia and individuals with schizotypal traits show impairments in envisioning future emotions, and these impairments are predominately observed in social domains. Therefore, investigating how individuals with schizophrenia or schizotypal traits predict anticipated emotions for social and non-social events would benefit the understanding of anhedonia and amotivation.

To address these issues, Dr. Raymond Chan from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. ZHANG Ruiting from Hunan Normal University ave developed a scale, namely the Social Affective Forecasting Scale (SAFS), to examine the relationship among anticipated emotions, schizotypal traits, and negative symptoms.

The researchers first recruited a main sample of 666 college students to complete the SAFS and other measures of anhedonia. Their results, based on both exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, indicated that the SAFS comprised a four-factor structure, including the positive social, the positive non-social, the negative social, and the negative non-social factors. These findings were further replicated in an independent sample of 927 college students.

They then examined the association of the SAFS with negative symptoms in 47 pairs of patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, and the association with schizotypal traits in a large sample of 2655 college students. Their results showed that interpersonal features of schizotypal traits and negative symptoms of schizophrenia were associated with reduced anticipated pleasure for future positive social events, but not for positive non-social events.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the newly developed SAFS has good reliability and validity in evaluating anticipated pleasure and displeasure for future social and nonsocial events in both clinical and subclinical samples.

The study entitled "Anticipated Pleasure and Displeasure for Future Social and nonsocial Events: A Scale Development Study" was published in Schizophrenia Bulletin Open on August 22.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province, the Scientific Foundation of Institute of Psychology, and the Phillip K.H. Wong Foundation.