An Evolutionary Model of Managing Moods: Evidence for the Role of Homeostatic Cognitive Strategies in Affect Regulation

Abstract

What are the adaptive evolutionary mechanisms, and the specific cognitive strategies that allow people to manage and maintain their daily mood fluctuations within reasonable limits? Despite intense recent interest in affective phenomena, spontaneous changes over time in mood effects have rarely been studied. This paper outlines a homeostatic theory of spontaneous mood management. It is suggested that affect management is achieved through automatic shifts between different information processing strategies capable of accentuating (through affective priming) or attenuating (through controlled processing) a prevailing affective state. Three experiments are presented investigating temporal fluctuations in the positivity and negativity of social responses by people who received an initial positive or negative mood induction. Following different mood manipulations, participants performed three kinds of serial social tasks: they generated person descriptions (Exp. 1), completed trait words (Exp. 2) or produced a...