Adaptation of Revised Social Anhedonia Scale (RSAS) on Russian sample

Abstract

Anhedonia (or hypohedonia) reflects a missing or reduced ability to experience pleasure. Interest in the concept of clinical psychology and psychopathology is due to the high significance of violations of ability to experience pleasure as a predictor of serious mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, depression, chemical dependency. For under- standing the psychological deficits of patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders is of particular importance to social anhedonia, reflecting the reduced ability to experience interest and pleasure from interactions with socially relevant stimuli and partners, and is implicated in disorders of social cognition, to social exclusion of patients. Revised Social Anhedonia Scale (RSAS) was designed to assess the severity of social anhedonia, tested in many countries, widely used in studies of schizophrenia. The problem of estimating the psychometric characteristics of the test RSAS, including the validity of the technique has become part of the project for the study of social cognition in mental disorders (grant funds of the Russian Science Foundation, Project № 14-18-03461). This article presents the results of the evaluation of the psychometric characteristics of RSAS and the applicability of the methodology for the Russian sample. The study was performed by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (grant № 14- 18-03461) at the Federal Medical Research Centre of Psychiatry and Narcology under the Ministry of Public Health of the Russian Federation.

Keywords

• social anhedonia
• psychiatric pathology
• schizophrenia
• external validity
• reliability
• consistency