At every moment, there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency.

Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish them across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.

An overview of the AMF can be found in a previous post. In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of goals as described in the AMF.

There are several lines of evidence indicating that people’s affect is attached to their (meaningful) goals. For example, a study by Asutay and Vjästfäll (2021) found that participants’ momentary affective valence was impacted by whether the stimuli they were presented with were relevant to the task they were given or not, with task-relevant stimuli promoting more positive affect.

Merely having a goal is one way of managing one’s affect (e.g., by preventing boredom). This idea is supported by ecological momentary assessment research indicating that people are engaged in a state of mind-wandering about 25% to 50% of the time (Gross, Raynes, Schooler, Guo, & Dobkins, 2024; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010), and that this mind-wandering state is associated with more negative affect than is attention towards the present-moment task (Gross et al., 2024; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010).

Furthermore, the replication and extension study by Gross and colleagues (2024) found that the negative affect associated with mind-wandering was attributable to negative thought valence during the experience. In the AMF, this kind of negative affect would be explained by the brain generating new goals in the moment, which often tend to be unfulfilled goals distally related to the current context (so nothing can be done about them in that moment) that then bring about negative affect (e.g., “It’s pathetic that I do not have a partner like all my friends. What must be wrong with me?”). If alternatively, someone is daydreaming about a positive experience, this tends to produce positive affect because it represents generating a meaningful goal that is already satisfied (Welz, Reinhard, Alpers, & Kuehner, 2017; Wen, Soffer-Dudek, & Somer, 2021).

This description also helps explain the impact of “oddly........

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