Tag: childhood trauma

Experiencing trauma in childhood can lead to a lack of motivation and less pleasure from rewards-or anhedonia-later in life. In humans, childhood trauma is linked to changes in the activity of reward-related brain pathways stemming from an area called the hippocampus. Preclinical work in animals suggests that hippocampal changes may contribute to anhedonia. But do hippocampal changes linked to childhood trauma make people more vulnerable to developing anhedonia? New in JNeurosci, a research team led by Kathleen O’Brien at Temple University and Vishnu Murty at the University of Oregon sought to answer this question.