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A new treatment for depression that boosts positive emotions outperforms traditional treatments
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Positive affect therapy restores patients’ capacity for joy, purpose, and motivation
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It is designed to combat anhedonia, the inability of depressed patients to experience positive emotions or pleasure.
MONDAY, April 27, 2026 (Health Day News) – The Most Vulnerable Sign depression can be something that doesn’t really exist—an emptiness that represents the inability to feel positive emotions or experience pleasure.
This symptom, known clinically as anhedonia, affects about 90% of people with major depression, but remains largely unaddressed by conventional treatment methods, researchers say.
Now, a new treatment approach that focuses on positive emotions has been developed and appears to outperform standard treatments aimed at reducing negative emotions, researchers report April 24 in JAMA Open Network.
The treatment, called Positive Affect Therapy (PAT), is designed to restore depressed patients’ capacity for joy, purpose, motivation and reward, the researchers said.
“There is a difference between feeling helpless and feeling hopeless,” said the lead researcher Alicia Meuretdirector of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in a news release.
“When you feel powerless, you still have motivation and desire to change something. When people feel hopeless, they don’t believe that things will change,” he said. “This is what anhedonia can look like, and taking away the negative emotions won’t fix it.”
To test PAT, researchers recruited 98 people with depression. The team randomly assigned half of them to receive PAT and the other half to receive conventional depression treatment that focuses on negative emotions.
PAT is a 15-session therapeutic program that directly targets the brain’s reward system, which controls how people experience and learn from positive events.
Treatment includes exercises that engage patients in rewarding activities, focus on positive experiences, and cultivate daily experiences such as gratitude, pleasure, and kindness.
Results showed that patients who received PAT improved on measures of both positive and negative emotions, although treatment was generally not negative.
Overall, the researchers found that PAT patients experienced greater improvements in depression and anxiety symptoms than those receiving standard treatment at a one-month follow-up.
These results suggest that targeting people’s ability to experience positive emotions is key to reducing depression and anxiety, the researchers concluded.
“It’s not enough to drive away evil,” Meuret said. “Therapist has to ask: Does this activity have meaning for you? Does it give you joy or a sense of accomplishment? Does it strengthen connection?”
However, the researchers said future studies with larger groups of people are needed to better understand the potential benefits of PAT, as well as how it produces better results than standard therapy.
More information
The Philadelphia Mental Health Center has more information anhedonia.
Source: Southern Methodist University, release, April 24, 2026
What does this mean for you?
Increasing people’s ability to experience positive emotions may be a better way to treat depression, researchers say.
