Education & Certifications

  • BA, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Psychology (2023)

Contact

  • Academic
    alemz@stanford.edu
    University - Student Department: Psychology Position: Graduate

Lab Affiliations

All Publications

  • Anhedonia buffers the effects of early-life unpredictability on threat-reward decision-making. bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology Leonard, B. T., Martinez-Ortiz, M. A., Bock, J., Zhang, Y., Flores, S., Taylor, D. V., Glynn, L. M., Davis, E. P., Stern, H. S., Baram, T. Z., Hartley, C. A., Yassa, M. A., Bornstein, A. 2026

    Abstract

    Anhedonia - the diminished capacity to experience or anticipate pleasure - is among the most common consequences of early-life unpredictability, yet how these co-occurring conditions jointly shape real-world decision-making remains unknown. Here, we use a sequential foraging-under-threat task to probe motivational conflict decisions in 357 individuals varying in early-life unpredictability and anhedonia symptoms. We find that unpredictability and anhedonia exert opposing influences on choice: unpredictability shifts behavior away from the survival-optimal policy in a sex-dependent manner, while anhedonia promotes adherence to it, partly through heightened sensitivity to unexpected threatening outcomes. A mediation analysis reveals that anhedonia partially buffers the deleterious effects of unpredictability on decision quality. These results demonstrate that co-occurring conditions can mask one another's behavioral signatures and suggest that the heterogeneous expression of transdiagnostic constructs like anhedonia may reflect context-dependent adaptations to distinct underlying etiologies.

    View details for DOI 10.64898/2026.05.16.725643

    View details for PubMedID 42239234

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC13228362