From mood to reward-guided decision making and back again

It is striking that despite the ubiquitous impact of mood fluctuations in our lives, we often find it difficult to explain even our own mood and why it fluctuates. It is common to think of mood changes as responses to real-world outcomes, reflecting for instance success or failure to obtain reward. In this talk, I will argue that the relationship between outcomes and mood is best understood as bidirectional: naturally, outcomes affect our mood, but our mood can also affect how we evaluate outcomes. In addition to explaining affective decision-making biases, I will show that this bidirectional interaction can explain escalatory and oscillatory dynamics of mood that would otherwise seem chaotic. I will present ​behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for this two-way interaction, and develop a computational model that reveals its adaptive and maladaptive consequences. In addition, I will introduce a novel smartphone-based experimental approach that allows studying how such cognitive dynamics unfold over time.

Looking forward to see you all.