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 across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.

In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of meaningfulness as described in the AMF:

The impact of goals on affective experience is highly contextual, and the meaningfulness of the goal is one factor that influences this relationship. It can most simply be described with the questions: “How important is this goal and why? What will happen or what will it mean if it is or is not completed?” The answers to these questions are variable across people and contexts, but generally determine how strongly affect is attached to the goal, and consequently, how motivated someone is to pursue it.

In this way, a person’s beliefs are a major part of their affect management system. For instance, belief formation is influenced by the affective shaping of information seeking, whereby people more readily seek out desirable rather than undesirable information (Bromberg-Martin & Sharot, 2020).

Supporting this view, a study by Kappes, Harvey, Lohrenz, Montague, and Sharot (2020) found that people tend to become much more confident in their beliefs when someone else agrees with them, but only slightly less confident when someone else disagrees. In turn, beliefs shape what people want to feel in different contexts (Tamir, 2016), such as wanting to feel sad at a funeral. In their review of the bidirectional relationship between affect and beliefs, Boden and Berenbaum (2010) state that “[t]he........

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