Effectiveness of Reward-Based Task on Affective Levels of Depressed Individuals

Objectives The present study examined the effects of reward-driven task on improving the affective levels in individuals with depressive symptoms.
Methods The present study is an experiment study with pretest- posttest and follow-up with control group. The community of this research was the students in Tabriz University in 2016-2017 semester. The sample size was 40 students which had visited the university counseling center 20 of them were assigned randomly to control group and 20 other experimental group. The intervention was given to the experimental group during 8 sessions (45 minutes per session) and 25 days by the Balloon Analogue Risk (reward-based task test), and the equivalent score obtained in each session was given to material rewards. Beck Depression Scale (BDI-II) and Mood Adjective Check List (MACL) were used for data collection. For data analysis, covariance analysis and SPSS version 23 software were used.
Results The posttest mean scores of the participants based on reward-based task in the intervention group were 18.1, 12.6, and 14.1 for hedonic tone, tense arousal, and energetic arousal, respectively, and 13.9, 19.3, and 13.2, respectively for the control group; the difference between the two groups was statistically significant (P=0.01). The effect size of the present intervention was 0.70. In addition, the observed difference between the mean scores of the affective levels in the participants based on the reward-based task in the intervention group (mean scores 15.7, 14.4, and 11.7 for hedonic tone, tense arousal, and energetic arousal, respectively) and the control group (mean scores 14.1, 18.9, and 13.6 for hedonic tone, tense arousal, and energetic arousal, respectively) differed significantly in the follow-up stage (PConclusion Rewards and consequences of fun-producing factor strengthened the desire to earn rewards and improve the activity levels that would affect the depressed patients, and the negative effect was reduced with the reward situation.