Emotions as computations

Emanuel, Aviv; Eldar, Eran

doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104977

Cited by 35 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 261 publications

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“…These signals indicate that the value of the current action is higher than what was expected based on previous events (Sutton & Barto, 2018), and were suggested to account for ramping patterns of dopaminergic activity as animals approach their rewards (Gershman, 2014;Kim et al, 2020). Positive RPEs were found to account for positive affective experiences in experiments (Rutledge et al, 2014) and real-world settings (Villano et al, 2020), and were suggested to account for a variety of positive emotional experiences (Emanuel & Eldar, 2022). In other words, temporal discounting models might also predict that effort level will increase as people approach their deadlines along with an increasingly more positive affective state.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Affective dynamics when approaching a deadline

Emanuel¹

2023

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Goal pursuits have long been associated with how good or bad people feel. The exact affective influence of approaching the end of a deadline-bound task, however, remains unclear. People's effort level usually increases as they approach a deadline, yet while some theories predict this pattern will correspond to an increase in positive affective state, others may suggest that affective state will follow an opposite trend. Here, participants (n = 22; 14 women) performed a deadline-bound spaceship game paradigm designed to measure U-shape patterns in effort allocation by the frequency of keypresses. Participants vocally rated how they feel on a scale ranging from -5 ("very bad") to +5 (very good) every 30 seconds through the game. We found that both effort level and affective ratings followed a U-shape pattern through the task. This result supports an opportunity cost model of goal gradients which suggests that people postpone competing activities in favor of performing a focal task when approaching a deadline.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Affective dynamics when approaching a deadline

Emanuel¹

2023

Preprint

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“…As for the latter, the question is why should momentary mood or affective judgements reflect the opportunity costs of cognitive effort, i.e., why should exerting cognitive effort change how we feel? Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that momentary mood ratings quantitatively reflect recent and history of rewards and losses (Eldar et al, 2018;Emanuel & Eldar, 2023;Keren et al, 2021;Liuzzi et al, 2021;Rutledge et al, 2017;Rutledge et al, 2014Rutledge et al, , 2015. Specifically, momentary mood is predicted by not only reward history but also an average of recent positive and negative prediction errors, i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the misery of cognitive effort

Chen¹,

Huys²,

Stringaris³

et al. 2023

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The effect of cognitive effort on mood is unclear. Expending cognitive effort is generally avoided but expenditure of cognitive effort is the primary feature of some popular recreational activities, such as sudoku or video games. However, one common confound is that previous studies mostly looked into mood changes before and after cognitive effort manipulation. Therefore, it is unknown what im- mediate impact cognitive effort has on momentary mood. To investigate this, in two studies, we used a letter sorting paradigm to test whether momentary mood ratings change with different levels of experimentally manipulated task difficulty. In study 1 (N = 105), we found that increased difficulty, and consequently cogni- tive effort, leads to more errors and lower mood ratings. In study 2 (N = 210), we replicated our results from study 1 and further demonstrated that cognitive effort influences mood independently from immediate reward. In conclusion, controlling for reward conditions, we found that cognitive effort reduces people’s moment to moment mood.

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“…These guidelines may be useful for investigating the roles of emotion and mood in decision making. A recent theoretic framework mapped different types of emotion to different computations during decision making (Emanuel & Eldar, 2022). Under this proposed framework, decision making is decomposed into multiple processes: outcome evaluation, value learning, policy learning, and planning.…”

Section: Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%