Affect-congruent attention modulates generalized reward expectations

We intuitively know that good mood nudges people toward expecting good outcomes, and bad mood nudges the opposite – but the cognitive mechanism by which this happens is not well understood. In this study, we briefly shifted participants’ mood in the lab and asked them to judge new combinations of simple cues they had learned about earlier, while tracking their eye movements. Mood changed where people looked within the mixture — toward the more promising cues when feeling up, and toward the less promising cues when feeling down — which in turn shaped their overall reward expectations.