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Affect-congruent attention modulates generalized reward expectations.

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Positive and negative emotions influence our expectations about future rewards. This study shows that induced positive affect boosts reward expectations, while negative affect lowers them, by altering attention to stimulus features.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Affective Science
  • Decision Making

Background:

  • Affective states (emotions) are linked to optimism and pessimism about future rewards.
  • Attention to positive or negative features may explain these affect-related biases in expectations.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how experimentally induced positive and negative affect influence feature-based attention.
  • To determine the impact of affect on reward expectations for novel stimuli.

Main Methods:

  • 120 participants completed a compound-generalization task.
  • Eye-tracking technology monitored participants' attention.
  • Computational modeling analyzed behavioral data.

Main Results:

  • Positive affect induction increased participants' reward expectations.
  • Negative affect induction decreased participants' reward expectations.
  • Affect-congruent attention shifts to stimulus features drove these expectation biases.

Conclusions:

  • Affective states significantly bias reward expectations.
  • Attention allocation is a key mechanism linking affect to expectation biases.
  • Findings offer mechanistic insight into how emotions shape generalized reward expectations.