During an experiment in which people played a game and won or lost money, neuroscientist Robb Rutledge noticed something strange. “Some people would be in a really good mood, and it wouldn’t actually be closely related to how much money they had,” he says. “That seemed very surprising to me.”
Rutledge, then a grad student studying the neuroscience of decision making at New York University, wondered whether it would be possible to figure out what determines those moods—specifically, how happy a person feels minute-to-minute. He went on to do a postdoc at University College London (UCL), where he ran similar experiments in which volunteers played a game for money, but this time he focused on constructing a model for what factors determined the players’ emotional responses to outcomes. Rather than the amount of their winnings, what mattered most to players’ moods was whether the reward exceeded their expectations.1
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