A Computational and Neural Model for Mood Dynamics

Abstract: The happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies, but we know relatively little about how daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. We show that happiness depends on the history of recent rewards and expectations, a result we have now replicated in thousands of individuals using smartphone-based data collection (https://happinessquest.app). Using neuroimaging, we show how happiness relates to neural activity and to the neuromodulator dopamine. Major depression is a highly heterogeneous psychiatric disorder that affects hundreds of millions of people around the world. Using a variety of smartphone-based tasks, we use computational models to gain insights into the factors that influence decision making, and we describe how depression affects the relationship between mood and behavior.