A mathematical equation can assess how you are feeling about experiences using your mood & brain activity.
People can struggle to accurately assess, how they feel about something, especially something they feel social pressure to enjoy, like awakening early for a yoga class.
How they really feel can often gleaned from their mood and their brain activity in reward regions, consistent with new research published in JNeurosci.
Chew, Blain & others measured participants’ mood with repeated questions and their brain activity with fMRI as they earned two kinds of rewards.
Participants chose a box to earn points tied to how much money they might earn at the end of the task, an extrinsic reward.
Then, they played a game where they navigated a cursor through on-screen barriers. They didn’t earn anything for playing the game, beyond their own satisfaction with doing well, an intrinsic reward.
Credit: Chew, Blain et al., JNeurosci 2021
The participants answered questions on how they felt throughout the study.
The research team developed a mathematical equation to find-out how much intrinsic & extrinsic rewards contributed to the participants’ mood during a particular moment.
Most of the people felt happier after earning more points, or successfully completing the game, but the contribution of either reward to happiness varied from person-to-person.
People whose happiness more swayed by intrinsic rewards had more activity in their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a gift area, during intrinsic rewards compared to extrinsic rewards & vice-versa.
These results provide a potential avenue to assess-preferences without outright asking.
The findings were published in The Journal Of Neuroscience.
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