Study assessed for the primary time whether each day fluctuations in mood and related variables (similar to stress or sleep) are coupled to fluctuations in metacognitive states (similar to confidence or response vigor) and concluded that within the healthy adult population, fluctuations of mood don’t interfere with confidence in decision-making.

Within the famous book “Descartes’ Error” (2008), the Portuguese neuroscientist António Damásio analyzes emotions and their fundamental role in human rational behavior, confirming a long-standing interconnection between emotions and cognition. On this sense, whether it is true that emotions and mood alternate episodes are a part of human nature, there are still few studies on how these mood fluctuations interact with metacognition and, particularly, with confidence in decision-making.

Considering this cutting-edge, researchers María da Fonseca, Giovanni Maffei, Rubén Moreno-Bote and Alexandre Hyafil from the University of Pompeu Fabra (Spain), Koa Health B.V. (Spain), Center de Recerca Matemàtica (Spain) and University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) began a longitudinal study based on two online experiments to evaluate whether implicit confidence markers will be related to mood states in healthy adults.

Within the article “Mood and implicit confidence independently fluctuate at different time scales”, published in October 2022 in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, the researchers explain that they used a sample of fifty participants, mainly amongst students from University of Pompeu Fabra, to trace subjects’ moods and decision-making over a period of 10 consecutive days in on a regular basis life settings.

The outcomes showed that there isn’t any significant correlation between each day fluctuations of mood and session-confidence markers, that’s, mood and associated variables, similar to sleep quality, food enjoyment and stress level, will not be consistently coupled with implicit confidence markers. Nonetheless, mood-related states and confidence level have been found to fluctuate at different time scales, with mood-related states displaying faster fluctuations (over sooner or later or half-a-day) than confidence level (two-and-a-half-days).

Rubén Moreno Bote, supported by the BIAL Foundation, finds it surprising to see that “spontaneous fluctuations in mood and confidence weren’t coupled, as expected in the unique hypothesis of this study, but evolved on different time scales”. For the researcher from the University of Pompeu Fabra, “findings on this area are necessary as they might contribute to a greater understanding of affective states disorders.”

Source:

Journal reference:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13415-022-01038-4#citeas