Assessing social anhedonia in adolescence: The ACIPS-A in a community sample

To date, nearly all self-report measures of anhedonia have been developed for use with adult samples. A valid measure of anhedonia that can be used with adolescents would be useful in order to address key questions about the nature and course of anhedonia during adolescence. This study examined the psychometric properties of an adolescent version of a relatively new measure of social anhedonia, namely, the Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale (ACIPS-A). The ACIPS-A was administered to a general, community-derived Spanish adolescent sample of 449 students, including 251 males (55.9%), who ranged in age from 13 to 19 years old. Other measures included the Temporal Experience of Pleasure Scale (TEPS), anhedonia subscales from the Oviedo Schizotypy Assessment Questionnaire (ESQUIZO-Q), and the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12). Exploratory factor analysis yielded a four-factor solution (close relationships, casual friendships and relationships, social bonding, and negative affiliation/emancipation). The total ACIPS-A showed excellent internal consistency, with ordinal alpha = 0.95. The ACIPS-A total scores were positively correlated with the TEPS-Anticipatory scores (r = 0.44, P < 0.001) and TEPS-Consummatory scores (r = 0.30, P < 0.001) but not with total GHQ-12 scores. The ACIPS-A total scores were negatively correlated with social anhedonia subscale scores (r = −0.55) taken from a measure developed for use with adolescents. These results suggest that the ACIPS-A is a valid measure for use with non-clinical adolescents and is likely to prove useful for screening purposes.