Abstract
According to dominant neuropsychological theories of affect, emotions signal salience of events and in turn facilitate a wide spectrum of response options or action tendencies. Valence of an emotional experience is pivotal here, as it alters reward and punishment processing, as well as the balance between safety and risk taking, which can be translated into changes in the exploration-exploitation trade-off during reinforcement learning (RL). To test this idea, we compared the behavioral performance of three groups of participants that all completed a variant of a standard probabilistic learning task, but who differed regarding which mood state was actually induced and maintained (happy, sad or neutral). To foster a change from an exploration to an exploitation-based mode, we removed feedback information once learning was reliably established. Although changes in mood were successful, learning performance was balanced between the three groups. Critically, when focusing on exploitation-driven learning only, they did not differ either. Moreover, mood valence did not alter the learning rate or exploration per se, when titrated using complementing computational modeling. By comparing systematically these results to our previous study (Bakic et al., 2014), we found that arousal levels did differ between studies, which might account for limited modulatory effects of (positive) mood on RL in the present case. These results challenge the assumption that mood valence alone is enough to create strong shifts in the way exploitation or exploration is eventually carried out during (probabilistic) learning. In this context, we discuss the possibility that both valence and arousal are actually necessary components of the emotional mood state to yield changes in the use and exploration of incentives cues during RL.
Highlights
Many students would agree that studying for an exam after a heartbreak is a hard thing to do
Van Steenbergen et al, 2010; Huntsinger, 2012), it is usually agreed that being in a state of increased emotionality alters motivational processes activated by cues signaling reward or punishment (Lang and Bradley, 2010), and learning by extension when this process is based on the direct exploitation of these incentives, like in the present case
Our primary goal was to assess if inducing happy mood could eventually lead to a gain in performance during reinforcement learning (RL), especially when externally-provided feedback information on task performance were omitted and exploitation of learned reward probabilities was fostered
Summary
Many students would agree that studying for an exam after a heartbreak is a hard thing to do. Some professors would argue that, if one wants to excel, the happy, falling in love phase is best avoided altogether. Even if it was possible, would it really be best if emotions were somehow hushed and kept at bay in order to learn? Is it possible that both happiness and sadness can enhance learning? Negatively valenced emotions, such as fear, sadness, anger, disgust, or frustration, signal threat and the need to recruit additional resources to deal with potential harm or loss (Isen, 1993; Ashby et al, 1999; Fredrickson, 2004)
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