Is seeking bad mood cognitively demanding? Contra-hedonic orientation and working-memory capacity in everyday life.

Abstract

Hedonism, or wanting to feel good, is central to human motivation. At times, however, people also seek to maintain or enhance negative affect or to dampen positive affect, and this can be instrumental for the later attainment of their goals. Here, we investigate the assumption that such contra-hedonic orientation is cognitively more demanding than prohedonic orientation, above and beyond the effects of momentary affective experience. We provided 378 participants with mobile phones that they carried with them for 3 weeks while pursuing their daily routines. The phones prompted participants at least 54 times to report their current affect-regulation orientation and to work on two trials of a cognitively demanding working memory task. As expected, contra-hedonic orientation was substantially less prevalent than prohedonic orientation. It was reported in 15% of the measurement occasions. Participants who reported on average more contra-hedonic orientation showed lower average working memory performance throughout the study interval. Further, controlling for the effects of accompanying affective experiences, momentary occurrences of contra-hedonic orientation were associated with temporary declines in working memory performance within individuals, and this could neither be explained by lacking task compliance nor by other characteristics of the individual or the situation. Prohedonic orientation showed a considerably smaller association with working memory performance. These findings are consistent with the view that contra-hedonic orientation is accompanied by momentarily more diminished cognitive resources than is prohedonic orientation.

Increase in Alzheimer's related markers preceeds memory disturbances: Studies in vasopressin-deficient Brattleboro rat

“…According to these assumptions the diminished immobility time of AVP-deficient rats during the forced swimming test [37] could be interpreted as changes in temperament [8,26], more active coping style or even learning disabilities. Other depressive-like symptoms, like anhedonia, which is also changed in the Brattleboro rat [48], may also influence memory processes.…”

Outside of the laboratory: Associations of working-memory performance with psychological and physiological arousal vary with age.

“…After these self-reports, participants completed two trials of a numerical memory-updating task (Salthouse, Babcock, & Shaw, 1991). Before the present data collection, participants had practiced the task intensively in a previous study in which they had completed two trials during each of M ϭ 54.9 testing occasions, SD ϭ 4.1 (Riediger, Wrzus, Schmiedek, Wagner, & Lindenberger, 2011). 1 In each trial, four digits in a grid of two-by-two cells were simultaneously presented to participants for 6,000 ms. Then, five updating operations (additions and subtractions within a range of Ϫ8 to ϩ 8) appeared successively in the cells of the grid (presentation times 3,500 ms; interstimulus interval 500 ms) in a way that no digit was updated twice in a row.…”

Daily variability in working memory is coupled with negative affect: The role of attention and motivation.

“…For example, there are situations in which people are oriented toward contra-hedonic states (Riediger, Schmiedek, Wagner, & Lindenberger, 2009;Tamir, 2009). Such efforts can also be cognitively costly (Riediger et al, 2011). Moreover, individuals differ regarding whether they consider high or low arousal affective states as ideal (Tsai, 2007).…”