Stochastic transitions between neutral and bimodal affective states under contradictory stimulation

Abstract

A person opens their news feed and finds, in rapid succession, a story that inspires hope and another that provokes outrage. This alternation between contradictory emotional valences is the ordinary texture of contemporary media environments. What are the long-term consequences of such contradictory stimulation on an individual’s core affective state—the continuous background feeling of being comfortable or uncomfortable, well or unwell, that colours all emotional experience? Could the long-term consequences depend less on the content of any single message than on the statistical structure of the stream’s inconsistency? We capture this structure in a minimal stochastic model that treats the strength of external influence as a fluctuating parameter, yielding a stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. Its stationary distribution reveals two regimes that defy straightforward intuition. Intense contradiction does not amplify engagement but instead drives the affective state toward neutrality—a form of apathy in which sustained affect is suppressed altogether; exact neutrality occurs only when the default bias vanishes. Conversely, moderate contradiction with strong influence produces bimodal affective instability, with random alternation between two well-separated emotional states that arise from intra-individual dynamics rather than social polarization. A systematic mapping of the parameter space reveals a region of robust bimodality for low regulatory capacity and a region of enhanced fragility for near-neutral default bias. We offer this model as a preliminary exploration rather than a definitive account, and we hope its analytical transparency will invite empirical testing and further theoretical development.