Depression is widely known as a mood disorder that involves symptoms of frequent negative affect, decreased pleasure in previously enjoyed activities, and increased guilt (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, as research has made progress in identifying variable treatment outcomes in patients, the hypothesis that depression solely affects an individual's mood paints a rather incomplete picture of the syndrome, which also includes neurophysiological, cognitive functioning and behavioral. To obtain a complete account of the etiology of this disorder, it is therefore necessary to take into consideration multiple factors that contribute to making this disorder one of the most disabling and counterproductive for society. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Research currently focuses increasingly on reward dysfunction in depression, suggesting that aspects of negative early life experiences may play a role in influencing one's life. lasting perception of reward. The inconsistent results of drug treatment and their unwanted side effects for clinically depressed individuals have encouraged further research on the disorder in various directions, such as cognitive-behavioral strategies and transcranial magnetic brain stimulation of neural regions, with the aim of expanding the range of treatments best and promising. alternative therapies to relieve persistent symptoms (Butler, Chapman, Forman, & Beck, 2006; George et al., 2000). Therefore, the widely shared understanding associating neurotransmitter imbalance with depressive disorder has limitations compared to a broader perspective of dysfunctional reward processing, which emphasizes possible cognitive and behavioral etiology. In a study that limited the intake of tryptophan, a precursor of serotonin, by healthy subjects, no depression was found as a result of decreased serotonin in these individuals, suggesting that factors influencing the increased susceptibility of already depressed individuals may be more important. significant contributor (Delgado, Charney, Price, Landis, & Heninger, 1989). Such causality of depression proposed by the serotonin hypothesis is therefore questionable and can be questioned due to the lack of consistent observations across studies (Blier, & El Mansari, 2013). The brain's mesolimbic dopaminergic reward pathway, with neuronal projections running from the midbrain region to the nucleus accumbens, has long fascinated researchers studying the significance of its role in reward-seeking behavior, addiction, and impulsivity. Nowadays, research is beginning to extend the concept of reward processing to include its influence on the psychopathology of depression. A reward is anything with an attractive value that creates a tendency in an individual to approach and consume it (Schultz, 2015). This approach and consumption behavior are called appetitive and consummatory, respectively. A reward is associated with the positive reinforcement effect of operant conditioning, which is a learning process that associates the outcome of a behavior with a reward or punishment. A person who is given a positive reward after a correct predicted behavioral response would be encouraged to engage in that particular behavior again. On the contrary, when the consequence of our behavior leads to.