Mood and Sources of Reward: The more or the less the better?

Computational approaches examine momentary changes in mood in relation to the environment. These studies have shown that various factors including participants’ past and previous experiences as well as contingencies between mood and the environment, could determine mood’s future responses to stimuli. However, several factors and their influence on mood remain unexplored. The aim of this study is to investigate how the availability of sources for reward would influence mood responses to positive and negative stimuli. For this, a new task was developed where a different number of sources for reward, in the form of minigames, were available to participants. The study was conducted online, using Amazon Mturk and a total of N=349 participants were recruited for six sets of experiments. In these, mood’s sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli was examined after participants have been exposed to environments with different numbers of minigames. We found that when fewer sources for reward are available, mood’s sensitivity to positive and negative stimuli decreases. Additionally, participants who demonstrated increased mood sensitivity, prior to exposure to reward sources, switched more between the different minigames that were accessible. These findings indicate that the availability of sources for reward in an environment is an important factor that could shape future mood responses. Further study is thus required to fully understand the impact that such environments could have on mood and consequently the quality of life of the participants.