An experimental approach to training mood for resilience

Abstract

According to influential theories about mood, exposure to environments characterized by specific patterns of punishments and rewards could shape mood response to future stimuli. This raises the intriguing possibility that mood could be trained by exposure to controlled environments. The aim of the present study is to investigate experimental settings that increase resilience of mood to negative stimuli. For this study, a new task was developed where participants register their mood when rewards are added or subtracted from their score. The study was conducted online, using Amazon MTurk, and a total of N = 1287 participants were recruited for all three sets of experiments. In an exploratory experiment, sixteen different experimental task environments which are characterized by different mood-reward relationships, were tested. We identified six task environments that produce the greatest improvements in mood resilience to negative stimuli, as measured by decreased sensitivity to loss. In a next step, we isolated the two most effective task environments, from the previous set of experiments, and we replicated our results and tested mood’s resilience to negative stimuli over time, in a novel sample. We found that the effects of the task environments on mood are detectable and remain significant after multiple task rounds (approximately two minutes) for an environment where good mood yielded maximum reward. These findings are a first step in our effort to better understand the mechanisms behind mood training and its potential clinical utility.