ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
A computational and neural model of momentary subjective well-being.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to 2 registered trials, which are not on this map. Cited by 186 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Understanding Motivation in Parkinson's Patients Through Neurophysiology
Neuro-computational Study of Thymic Fluctuations in Mood Disorders - MOODELING
Who cites it
186 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Great Expectations: A Critical Review of and Suggestions for the Study of Reward Processing as a Cause and Predictor of Depression.Biological psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Common and distinct neural correlates of personal and vicarious reward: A quantitative meta-analysis.NeuroImage · 2015Pooled it
- A cognitive layer architecture to support large-language model performance in psychotherapy interactions.Nature medicine · 2026Trial
- Neural signatures of risk-taking adaptions across health, bipolar disorder, and lithium treatment.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Trial
- Mindfulness and music interventions in the workplace: assessment of sustained attention and working memory using a crowdsourcing approach.BMC psychology · 2022Trial
- Trial
- Trial
- High reward expectancy during methylphenidate depresses the dopaminergic response to gain and loss.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Overstatement in happiness reporting with ordinal, bounded scale.Scientific reports · 2016Trial
- Dopaminergic Modulation of Decision Making and Subjective Well-Being.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2015Trial
- Dissociable roles of reward prediction error in the contrasting mood dynamics of depression and anxiety.eLife · 2026Article
- Article
- Mood computational mechanisms underlying increased risk behavior in adolescent suicidal patients.eLife · 2026Article
- Emotional reactions to real-world events predict shifts in longer term affective states.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Assessing the validity and reliability of computational phenotyping of mood.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- A dynamic affective surprise signal influences episodic memory.Cognition · 2026Article
- Hope for happiness in an emerging country during the COVID-19 pandemic.BMC psychology · 2026Article
- Anterior insula reactivity to loss moderates the association between trait impulsivity and future suicidal ideation in adolescents.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2026Article
- Mood modulations of emotional word processing: A predictive perspective view of EEG data.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
126 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The subjective well-being or happiness of individuals is an important metric for societies. Although happiness is influenced by life circumstances and population demographics such as wealth, we know little about how the cumulative influence of daily life events are aggregated into subjective feelings. Using computational modeling, we show that emotional reactivity in the form of momentary happiness in response to outcomes of a probabilistic reward task is explained not by current task earnings, but by the combined influence of recent reward expectations and prediction errors arising from those expectations. The robustness of this account was evident in a large-scale replication involving 18,420 participants. Using functional MRI, we show that the very same influences account for task-dependent striatal activity in a manner akin to the influences underpinning changes in happiness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.