People usually dislike moody people and see them as irrational and disadvantageous. However, a new theory contests that mood swings can actually be a positive thing and may show social advantages of being able to adapt in all circumstances.
A new theory was published in November 3 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences about how mood draws on experiences and can, as a matter of fact, help us quickly adapt to changes in our environment. To simply put, for example, a trader's mood should improve after experiencing unexpected gains on the stock market like bt shares. The positive mood generated may then cause the trader to take more risks, significantly helping her adjust more quickly to a market that is generally on the rise. People's expectations come to reflect not only the reward associated with each particular state (like each stock), but also recent changes in the overall availability of reward in their environment. Through this way, the existence of mood allows learning to account for the impact of general environmental factors.
Lead author Eran Eldar from University College London explained that this effect of mood should be helpful whenever different sources of reward are interconnected or possess an underlying momentum. This may actually be the usual case in the natural and modern world-successes in acquiring skills, material resources, social status and even relationships may all affect one another.
Eldar and his team made it clear that positive or negative moods make the most of their usefulness by persisting only until expectations are fully in accordance with changes in rewards. This may explain why people return to their baseline level of happiness even after winning the lottery. For example, a depressing mood that continues to exist may cause a person to see many succeeding outcomes worse than they really are, leading him or her to a downward spiral. Elder took note that this novel approach may help them reveal what prompts particular individuals to bipolar disorder and depression.
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