Social anhedonia associated with poor evaluative processing but not with poor cognitive control

Emotion researchers have distinguished between automatic vs. controlled processing of evaluative information. There is suggestive evidence that social anhedonia might be associated with problems in controlled evaluative processing. The current study examined whether college students with elevated social anhedonia would exhibit an increased processing effect on tasks involving either evaluative processing or cognitive control. On an evaluative processing task, affective primes and targets could be either congruent or incongruent and participants judged the valence of targets. On a cognitive control task, participants completed the color-naming Stroop task. Compared to control participants (n = 47), people with elevated social anhedonia (n = 27) exhibited an increased evaluative processing effect as they were slower and made more errors for incongruent than for congruent trials on the evaluative processing task. In contrast, there were no group differences on the Stroop task or on a semantic priming task. Overall, these results suggest that people with elevated social anhedonia might have problems with some aspects of evaluative processing.