Engaging in varied behaviors promotes well-being in both humans and non-human animals. The current study tested whether the diversity of daily life activities and experiences are associated with affect and cognition across adulthood. Additional analyses explored the role of the catecholamine systems in sustaining the benefits of daily life diversity. Participants (N=184) ages 18-87 completed three weeks of daily life sampling that included repeated measurements of activities, affect, and geolocation. In a subset of these participants, we used MRI (N=72) and PET (N=35) to measure catecholamine systems. Both activity and experiential diversity were independently associated with affect, but not cognition. Interestingly, the coupling between affect and activity diversity was related to the dopaminergic system, whereas the coupling between affect and experiential diversity was associated with the noradrenergic system. These findings suggest that catecholamine systems play complementary roles in supporting the affective benefits of activity and experiential diversity across adulthood.

BACKGROUND:Shared decision-making (SDM) emphasizes informed, value-aligned choices, yet affect has not been a primary focus and is rarely addressed explicitly in cancer contexts. Among men with low-to intermediate-risk prostate cancer (LIRPC), active treatment and active surveillance each involve distinct affective challenges that may influence risk perception, decisional uncertainty, and treatment satisfaction. Despite prior work in affect and decision making literature, its integration into cancer contexts remains limited. AIMS:To address the gap, this study examined how affect, alongside cognition and psychosocial factors, was reflected in men's accounts of LIRPC treatment decision making, guided by SDM and affective science frameworks. METHODS:We conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 men with LIRPC across three treatment pathways: AS, AT, and AS-AT transition. Interviews were theory-informed and explored (a) how participants learned and interpreted diagnostic information; (b) how thoughts, emotions, and relationships were experienced in decision-making; and (c) how men reflected on preferred roles. Participants also completed the Control Preferences Scale. RESULTS:Eleven themes emerged across domains. Understanding of information depended on both the clarity of medical communication and its relational context. Participants described strong affective responses at diagnosis, awaiting test results, and shortly before surgery. Decision-making was often deliberative, with men weighing options alongside personal values and priorities, physician trust, and family support. Post-treatment reflections emphasized autonomy and value alignment, with coping used to manage affect and maintain a sense of control. CONCLUSIONS:In LIRPC decision-making, affect appeared to vary across contexts and time points. Although decisions were often described as deliberative, affect seemed embedded in how men interpreted information, navigated relationships, and defined what mattered (including quality of life, anticipated treatment outcomes, and autonomy), which influenced how options were weighed. Incorporating affect into decision support, particularly around key moments, may strengthen SDM and treatment satisfaction.

Background. Shared decision-making (SDM) emphasizes informed, value-aligned choices, yet affect has not been a primary focus and is rarely addressed explicitly in cancer treatment decision-making. Among men with low- to intermediate-risk prostate cancer (LIRPC), active treatment (AT) can trigger fears of significant side effects, whereas active surveillance (AS) often evokes persistent anxiety, uncertainty, and fear of progression. These affective challenges can shape risk perceptions, increase decisional conflict, and reduce satisfaction. Aims. To address the gap, this study examined how affective-cognitive-psychosocial processes shape LIRPC treatment decisions, guided by SDM and affective science frameworks. Methods. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 28 men with LIRPC across three treatment pathways: AS, AT, and AS-AT transition. Interviews explored a) how participants learned and interpreted diagnostic information; b) how thoughts, emotions, values, and relation dynamics influenced decision-making; and c) how men reflected on preferred roles. Themes and illustrative quotes were extracted. Participants completed the Control Preferences Scale. Results. Eleven themes emerged across domains. Information understanding was shaped by the clarity of medical information and the relational context of its delivery. Decision-making unfolded from initial shock to greater stability as men balanced evidence with personal values, navigated uncertainty, and drew on identity, prior experiences, physician trust, and family support. Post-treatment reflections emphasized autonomy, value alignment. Men engaged in coping to regulate affect and maintain control. Conclusions . Findings suggest that LIRPC decisions are affectively informed. Within SDM, men valued autonomy and deliberately balanced medical information with personal values, yet this rational stance unfolded alongside affective dynamics. Affect shaped what mattered most through value weighting, identity protection, and relational trust. Integrating affect-informed psychosocial approaches into decision support may improve SDM, treatment satisfaction, and HRQOL.

Our affective experiences, including both positive and negative emotions and longer term affective states (LTASs) like moods, color everyday life. Emotional responses, momentary affective reactions arising from individual events and lasting from seconds to hours, can impact one's mood, diffuse affective states that lack a single causal event, and last much longer (e.g., days to weeks). However, the extent to which emotional responses and the events that elicited them impact mood on these longer timescales is unclear. Using a high-stakes, naturalistic paradigm, we tested whether exam grades, grade prediction errors, or the emotional reactions they elicit predict shifts in LTAS. For several semesters from 2019 through 2022, we assessed 821 college students' emotional responses to exam grades and, in the weeks surrounding exam grade feedback, assessed their LTASs. We demonstrate that emotional reactions to exam grades, grades themselves, and exam prediction errors all predict shifts in LTAS but that these effects decay across time. After completing model comparisons of several combinations of predictors, we found that the model best fit to predict LTASs includes immediate emotional response, grade, and exam prediction errors. Upon examining the model outputs, we found that emotional response and exam grade primarily predict changes in LTASs, suggesting that LTASs are not just an aggregate of time-attenuated emotions but can reflect other features like outcome value. However, there may be limits to the generalizability of the findings due to the diversity of the age, race, and gender diversity of the sample. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Premenstrual symptoms are distressing and impairing for individuals and costly to society. These symptoms are heterogeneous within and across people, dimensional, and dynamic. While some efforts have been made to understand the trajectories of premenstrual symptoms, two major gaps in the literature remain. First, we lack understanding of the covariation among symptoms over the course of the menstrual cycle. Second, we know little about the trajectories of these symptoms and why symptoms might take different courses. To address these gaps, a sample of female undergraduates (N = 85) who reported no use of hormonal birth control and regularly occurring menstrual periods were recruited for a 4-month-long electronic daily diary study of premenstrual symptoms. We explored the covariation of symptoms over the cycle by conducting a multilevel exploratory factor analysis of the daily diary items. We identified six distinct but correlated symptom domains at the within-person level which were affective, cognitive, interpersonal, pain, and somatic. Next, we characterized the trajectories of each symptom domain using multilevel natural spline models and their first/second derivatives. Somatic symptoms increased/decreased more sharply and quickly than other symptom domains, pointing to a unique trajectory. Interpersonal and affective symptoms, on the other hand, were milder throughout. We demonstrated the importance of investigating the differences among symptom domain trajectories and underscored the need for future research to elucidate the unique mechanisms that underlie each trajectory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Across myriad, real-world contexts, we encounter the challenge of learning to take actions that bring about desirable outcomes. The theoretical framework of reinforcement learning proposes formal algorithms through which agents learn from experience to make rewarding choices. These formal models capture many aspects of reward-guided human behavior in controlled laboratory contexts. Here, we suggest that the constructs (i.e., states, actions, and rewards) and algorithms formalized within reinforcement learning theory can be operationally defined and extended to additionally account for learning in complex, natural environments. We discuss several recent examples of empirical studies that provide evidence of signatures of reinforcement learning across diverse human behaviors in everyday environments.

Awaiting news of uncertain outcomes is distressing because the news might be disappointing. To prevent such disappointments, people often "brace for the worst," pessimistically lowering expectations before news arrives to decrease the possibility of surprising disappointment (a negative prediction error, or PE). Computational decision-making research commonly assumes that expectations do not drift within trials, yet it is unclear whether expectations pessimistically drift in real-world, high-stakes settings, what factors influence expectation drift, and whether it effectively buffers emotional responses to goal-relevant outcomes. Moreover, individuals learn from PEs to accurately anticipate future outcomes, but it is unknown whether expectation drift also impedes PE-based learning. In a sample of students awaiting exam grades (N = 625), we found that expectations often drift and tend to drift pessimistically. We demonstrate that bracing is preferentially modulated by uncertainty; it transiently buffers the initial emotional impact of negative PEs but impairs PE-based learning, counterintuitively sustaining uncertainty into the future.

Work by many groups demonstrate links between peripheral markers of inflammation and symptoms of depression. Here, Nusslock and colleagues present an update to their neuroimmune network model to incorporate a developmental lens. They propose that specific neural circuits may be responsible for causing heightened inflammation. One principal circuit includes the amygdala and prefrontal cortex and is proposed to be involved in threat detection. Thus, heightened threat sensitivity resulting from early life stress is suggested to cause increases in inflammatory signaling. Second, the authors suggest that reward circuits, including the striatum, may be targets of increased inflammation leading to symptoms of anhedonia. In this commentary, I add context to the model proposed by Nusslock et al., suggesting that taking a learning perspective and considering additional circuits, including the hippocampus and midline structures may be necessary to more fully account for the phenomena described by the authors.

Background Depression is characterized by abnormalities in emotional processing, but the specific drivers of such emotional abnormalities are unknown. Computational work indicates that both surprising outcomes (prediction errors; PEs) and outcomes (values) themselves drive emotional responses, but neither has been consistently linked to affective disturbances in depression. As a result, the computational mechanisms driving emotional abnormalities in depression remain unknown.Methods Here, in 687 individuals, one-third of whom qualify as depressed via a standard self-report measure (the PHQ-9), we use high-stakes, naturalistic events - the reveal of midterm exam grades - to test whether individuals with heightened depression display a specific reduction in emotional response to positive PEs.Results Using Bayesian mixed effects models, we find that individuals with heightened depression do not affectively benefit from surprising, good outcomes - that is, they display reduced affective responses to positive PEs. These results were highly specific: effects were not observed to negative PEs, value signals (grades), and were not related to generalized anxiety. This suggests that the computational drivers of abnormalities in emotion in depression may be specifically due to positive PE-based emotional responding.Conclusions Affective abnormalities are core depression symptoms, but the computational mechanisms underlying such differences are unknown. This work suggests that blunted affective reactions to positive PEs are likely mechanistic drivers of emotional dysregulation in depression.

Background Social well-being impacts cancer patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and coping style. This secondary analysis was conducted to examine whether advanced prostate cancer survivors who had experienced low social well-being would benefit from a web-based cognitive behavioral stress management (CBSM) intervention. Method APC survivors ( N = 192) who had received androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) were randomized to a 10-week CBSM or a health promotion (HP) control condition. A subsample of participants ( n = 61) with low pre-intervention SWB (measured by social support from and relationship satisfaction with family and friends) was included in the study. Multilevel models compared participants’ PC-specific quality of life (sexual, hormonal, urinary), affect-based psychosocial burden (cancer-related anxiety and distress), and coping strategies at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months. Covariates were included in all models as appropriate. Results Participants randomized to the CBSM condition showed significantly greater improvements in fear of cancer recurrence and cancer-related intrusive thoughts than those in the HP control condition. A significant condition by time interaction was also found, indicating that CBSM improved participants’ PC-related fear in both short- (6 months) and long-term (12 months). However, the CBSM intervention did not significantly impact APC-related symptom burden. Only for the urinary domain, clinically meaningful changes (CBSM vs HP) were observed. In addition, all participants, regardless of condition, reported less coping (e.g., emotion-, problem- and avoidance-focused) over time. Conclusion As predicted, the CBSM intervention improved several affect-based psychosocial outcomes for APC survivors with low baseline SWB.

Work by many groups demonstrate links between peripheral markers of inflammation and symptoms of depression. Here, Nusslock and colleagues present an update to their neuroimmune network model to incorporate a developmental lens. They propose that specific neural circuits may be responsible for causing heightened inflammation. One principal circuit includes the amygdala and prefrontal cortex and is proposed to be involved in threat detection. Thus, heightened threat sensitivity resulting from early life stress is suggested to cause increases in inflammatory signaling. Second, the authors suggest that reward circuits, including the striatum, may be targets of increased inflammation leading to symptoms of anhedonia. In this commentary, I add context to the model proposed by Nusslock et al., suggesting that taking a learning perspective and considering additional circuits, including the hippocampus and midline structures may be necessary to more fully account for the phenomena described by the authors.

Familism, the cultural value that emphasizes feelings of loyalty and dedication to one’s family, has been related to both positive and negative outcomes in Hispanic cancer survivors. One potential source of observed inconsistencies may be limited attention to the family environment, as familism may be protective in a cohesive family whereas it can exacerbate distress in a conflictive family. The current study explored the associations of familism with general and disease-specific health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in Hispanic men who completed prostate cancer (PC) treatment, and whether family cohesion may help explain these relationships. Hispanic men treated for localized PC (e.g., radiation, surgery) were enrolled in a randomized controlled stress management trial and assessed prior to randomization. Familism (familial obligation) was assessed using Sabogal’s Familism Scale and family cohesion was measured using the Family Environment Scale (ranging from high to low). The sexual, urinary incontinence, and urinary obstructive/irritative domains of the Expanded Prostate Cancer Index Composite – Short Form measured disease-specific HRQoL. The physical, emotional, and functional well-being subscales of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy – General captured general HRQoL. Hierarchical linear regression and the SPSS PROCESS macro were used to conduct moderation analyses, while controlling for relevant covariates. Participants were 202 older men on average 65.7 years of age (SD = 8.0) who had been diagnosed with PC an average of 22 months prior to enrollment. Familism was not directly associated with general and disease-specific HRQoL. Moderation analyses revealed that greater familism was related to poorer urinary functioning in the incontinence (p = .03) and irritative/obstructive domains (p = .01), and lower emotional well-being (p = .02), particularly when family cohesion was low. These findings underscore the importance of considering contextual factors, such as family cohesion, in understanding the influence of familism on general and disease-specific HRQoL among Hispanic PC patients. The combined influence of familism and family cohesion predicts clinically meaningful differences in urinary functioning and emotional well-being during the posttreatment phase. Culturally sensitive psychosocial interventions to boost family cohesion and leverage the positive impact of familistic attitudes are needed to enhance HRQoL outcomes in this population.

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) captures shared cognitive and emotional features of content-specific cognition, including future-focused worry and past-focused rumination. The degree to which these distinct but related processes recruit overlapping neural structures is undetermined, because most neuroscientific studies only examine worry or rumination in isolation. To address this, we developed a paradigm to elicit idiographic worries and ruminations during an fMRI scan in 39 young adults with a range of trait RNT scores. We measured concurrent emotion ratings and heart rate as a physiological metric of arousal. Multivariate representational similarity analysis revealed that regions distributed across default mode, salience, and frontoparietal control networks encode worry and rumination similarly. Moreover, heart rate did not differ between worry and rumination. Capturing the shared neural features between worry and rumination throughout networks supporting self-referential processing, memory, salience detection, and cognitive control provides novel empirical evidence to bolster cognitive and clinical models of RNT.

Many lifestyle and psychosocial factors are associated with a longer lifespan; central among these is social connectedness, or the feeling of belongingness, identification, and bond as part of meaningful human relationships. Decades of research have established that social connectedness is related not only to better mental health (e.g., less loneliness and depression) but also to improved physical health (e.g., decreased inflammatory markers, reduced cortisol activity). Recent methodological advances allow for the investigation of a novel marker of biological health by deriving a predicted "age of the brain" from a structural neuroimaging scan. Discrepancies between a person's algorithm-predicted brain-age and chronological age (i.e., the brain-age gap) have been found to predict mortality and psychopathology risk with accuracy rivaling other known measures of aging. This preregistered investigation uses the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study to examine connections between the quality of social connections, the brain-age gap, and markers of mortality risk to understand the longevity-promoting associations of social connectedness from a novel biological vantage point. While social connectedness was associated with markers of mortality risk (number of chronic conditions and ability to perform activities of daily living), our models did not find significant links between social connectedness and the brain-age gap, or the brain-age gap and mortality risk. Supplemental and sensitivity analyses suggest alternate approaches to investigating these associations and overcoming limitations. While plentiful evidence underscores that being socially connected is good for the mind, future research should continue to consider whether it impacts neural markers of aging and longevity.

Cognitive risk factors are key in the vulnerability for internalizing disorders. Cognitive risk factors modulate the way individuals process information from the environment which in turn impacts the day-to-day affective experience. In 296 young adults, we assessed two transdiagnostic, general risk factors-repetitive negative thinking (RNT) and anxiety sensitivity in a high-RNT subsample (N = 119). We also assessed disorderand content-specific risk factors including worry, rumination, and three facets of anxiety sensitivity (cognitive, social, physical). To determine the day-to-day affective experience, we used cell-phone-based ecological momentary assessment to assess the mean and variability of positive and negative affect (PA; NA) over 3-4 months. Two multilevel multivariate Bayesian models were used to predict PA and NA mean and variability from (1) general and (2) specific cognitive risk factors. Mean NA was a nonspecific correlate of cognitive risk across both models, while mean PA was most strongly related to RNT and rumination. NA variability was most strongly related to RNT, rumination, and the physiological facet of anxiety sensitivity. PA variability was a specific correlate of RNT. Results highlight that cognitive risk factors for internalizing disorders manifest in unique patterns of day-to-day emotional experience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Negative interpretation bias, the tendency to appraise ambiguous stimuli as threatening, shapes our emotional lives. Various laboratory tasks, which differ in stimuli features and task procedures, can quantify negative interpretation bias. However, it is unknown whether these tasks globally predict individual differences in real-world negative (NA) and positive (PA) affect. Across two studies, we tested whether different lab-based negative interpretation bias tasks predict daily NA and PA, measured via mobile phone across months. To quantify negative interpretation bias, Study 1 (N = 69) used a verbal, self-referential task whereas Study 2 (N = 110) used a perceptual, emotional image task with faces and scenes. Across tasks, negative interpretation bias was linked to heightened daily NA. However, only negative interpretation bias in response to ambiguous faces was related to decreased daily PA. These results illustrate the ecological validity of negative interpretation bias tasks and highlight converging and unique relationships between distinct tasks and naturalistic emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Organisms learn from prediction errors (PEs) to predict the future. Laboratory studies using small financial outcomes find that humans use PEs to update expectations and link individual differences in PE-based learning to internalizing disorders. Because of the low-stakes outcomes in most tasks, it is unclear whether PE learning emerges in naturalistic, high-stakes contexts and whether individual differences in PE learning predict psychopathology risk. Using experience sampling to assess 625 college students’ expected exam grades, we found evidence of PE-based learning and a general tendency to discount negative PEs, an “optimism bias.” However, individuals with elevated negative emotionality, a personality trait linked to the development of anxiety disorders, displayed a global pessimism and learning differences that impeded accurate expectations and predicted future anxiety symptoms. A sensitivity to PEs combined with an aversion to negative PEs may result in a pessimistic and inaccurate model of the world, leading to anxiety.

Emotional distress and adversity can contribute to negative health outcomes in women with breast cancer. Individual differences in perceived stress management skills such as cognitive reframing and relaxation for coping with adversity have been shown to predict less distress and better psychological and physiological adaptation. Prior work shows that more distressed breast cancer patients reveal less metabolic activity in brain regions such as the insula, thalamus, ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortices. This led us to pose the hypothesis that breast cancer patients with greater stress management skills (e.g., ability to reframe stressors and use relaxation) may conversely show greater activation in these brain regions and thereby identify brain activity that may be modifiable through stress management interventions. The main objective of this study was to examine the association of perceived stress management skill efficacy with the metabolism of 9 key stress-implicated brain regions in women diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.Sixty women (mean age 59.86 ± 10.04) with a diagnosis of mBC underwent 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography. Perceived stress management skill efficacy was assessed with the Measure of Current Status Scale.Greater perceived stress management skill efficacy related significantly to higher metabolic activity in the insula, thalamus, ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortices, and basal ganglia; this network of regions overlaps with those previously shown to be under-activated with greater level of distress in this same sample of metastatic breast cancer patients.This is the first study to demonstrate in metastatic cancer patients that greater perceptions of stress management skill efficacy are associated with metabolic activity in key brain regions and paves the way for future studies tracking neural mechanisms sensitive to change following stress management interventions for this population.