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In psychotic disorders, motivation and pleasure (MAP) deficits are associated with decreased social affiliation and functional impairment. We leveraged a transdiagnostic sample enriched for psychosis and a multi-method approach to test the hypothesis that MAP deficits undermine the benefits of social affiliation. Participants completed the Social Affiliation Enhancement Task (SAET) to cultivate affiliation with an experimental partner. While the SAET increased affiliation and mood, individuals with greater MAP deficits derived smaller emotional benefits from the partners indexed by subjective report and objective facial behavior. Following the SAET, we used the Handholding fMRI paradigm—combining a threat-anticipation manipulation with varying degrees of affiliative contact—to determine whether MAP deficits undermine the social regulation of distress. Individuals with greater MAP deficits showed diminished neural ‘benefits’—reduced dampening of threat-elicited activation from affiliative contact in key frontoparietal nodes of the Dorsal Attention Network. In short, MAP symptoms disrupt the emotional and neuroregulatory benefits of social affiliation.