A highly replicable decline in mood during rest and simple tasks

Does our mood change as time passes? This question is central to behavioural and affective science, yet it remains largely unexamined. To investigate, we intermixed subjective momentary mood ratings into repetitive psychology paradigms. Here we demonstrate that task and rest periods lowered particip...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature human behaviour Vol. 7; no. 4; pp. 596 - 610
Main Authors: Jangraw, David C., Keren, Hanna, Sun, Haorui, Bedder, Rachel L., Rutledge, Robb B., Pereira, Francisco, Thomas, Adam G., Pine, Daniel S., Zheng, Charles, Nielson, Dylan M., Stringaris, Argyris
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.04.2023
Nature Publishing Group
Subjects:
4014/477/2811
631/378/1689/1414
631/477/2811
Adolescent
Adult
Affect
Affect (Psychology)
Behavior
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Emotions
Experimental Psychology
Experiments
Gambling
Humans
Life Sciences
Mathematical models
Mental depression
Mental health
Microeconomics
Mood Disorders
Neurosciences
Personality and Social Psychology
Psychiatry
Psychology
Ratings & rankings
Subjectivity
Time
University colleges
ISSN:2397-3374, 2397-3374
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Does our mood change as time passes? This question is central to behavioural and affective science, yet it remains largely unexamined. To investigate, we intermixed subjective momentary mood ratings into repetitive psychology paradigms. Here we demonstrate that task and rest periods lowered participants’ mood, an effect we call ‘Mood Drift Over Time’. This finding was replicated in 19 cohorts totalling 28,482 adult and adolescent participants. The drift was relatively large (−13.8% after 7.3 min of rest, Cohen’s d  = 0.574) and was consistent across cohorts. Behaviour was also impacted: participants were less likely to gamble in a task that followed a rest period. Importantly, the drift slope was inversely related to reward sensitivity. We show that accounting for time using a linear term significantly improves the fit of a computational model of mood. Our work provides conceptual and methodological reasons for researchers to account for time’s effects when studying mood and behaviour. In a series of experiments, Jangraw et al. show that people’s mood declines over time in common psychological tasks and during rest periods, but not in freely chosen behaviours.
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D.C.J., H.K., D.M.N., and A.S. devised the task. D.C.J. wrote the online experiments. D.C.J. and H.S. collected the online data. R.L.B. and R.B.R. provided data and information from the mobile app experiments. C. Z. and F.P. devised the computational model. D.C.J., C.Z., and D.M.N. wrote analysis code. D.C.J. and D. M.N. ran the analyses. D.C.J., D.M.N., and A.S. wrote the manuscript. All authors provided revisions and finalized the text.
These authors contributed equally to this work
Author Contributions
ISSN:2397-3374
2397-3374
DOI:10.1038/s41562-023-01519-7