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 need to make sense of experience and the need to regulate affect drive the feedback loop through which affect and belief influence each other, thereby leading to belief evolution.”

A sense of meaningfulness can come from several different sources, such as a degree of challenge, where the meaning comes from the question: Will I be able to do it? (Higgins, 2012). For example, one could quickly create the goal of counting to the number seven and satisfy the goal, but it likely would not sway affective experience. If, on the other hand, a small child learning to count does it, this would likely produce positive affect, resulting directly from a sense of challenge. Another source of meaningfulness is in opposing outside obstacles or interruptions (Higgins, 2012), which can act as one source of the sunken cost fallacy (e.g., continuing to wait in a long line despite the benefits otherwise not being worth it). This source of meaningfulness is consistent with the ecological psychology perspective that the environment prompts certain goals within the individual (Withagen, 2022).

An additional source of meaningfulness in experience is the brain’s computing of counterfactuals (i.e., a simulation of the world if it were different). Closely connected to the operations of the default mode network (Van Hoeck et al., 2013), counterfactual thinking can result in both positive affect (e.g., relief at having nearly avoided a car accident) or negative affect (e.g., regret at purchasing something just before it went on sale), depending on the context and whether the goal was or was not satisfied in reality. In addition to these reactionary examples, counterfactual thinking, such as daydreaming, can be an important part of attaching positive affective experience to the goal, which can then help motivate someone to see it through regardless of whether that goal is helpful to the person (Langens, 2002; Kappes, Singmann, & Oettingen, 2012).

Similarly, the consequences of building or deconstructing meaning (i.e., updating a belief or mental rule) for affect depend on the context. For example, if someone is stressed cleaning for their friend’s arrival, and then finds out their friend does not care about messes, this removes the meaningfulness of the goal of cleaning but may also be experienced as affectively positive. Alternatively, a student finding out others cheated on a test that they had studied hard for can be affectively negative if it threatens a sense of meaningfulness from the accomplishment of scoring well. Thus, whether the creation or deconstruction of meaning-making is experienced as affectively positive or negative may be moderated by whether the goal they promote pursuing or relinquishing is considered more of a threat or an inviting affordance.

Within the AMF, it is not assumed that meaning-making is a purely conscious process. In fact, much of this meaning-making happens outside of conscious awareness, unless the process goes awry, as in the case of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon (e.g., Schwartz & Pounaghdali, 2020), where it then becomes the conscious goal to find the correct verbal expression of the meaning (Jackendoff, 2012). Additionally, meaning-making can influence interoceptive experiences below conscious awareness, as is clearly the case in emotional experience, where allostasis in the context of a perceived threat implements a stress response in the body that is then perceived in conscious awareness (Goldstein & McEwen, 2002; Sterling, 2012; Shaffer, Westlin, Quigley, Whitfield-Gabrieli, & Barrett, 2022).

References

Boden, M. T., & Berenbaum, H. (2010). The bidirectional relations between affect and belief. Review of General Psychology, 14(3), 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019898

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Feng, Y. Y., Ogasawara, T., White, J. K., Zhang, K., & Monosov, I. E. (2024). A neural mechanism for conserved value computations integrating information and rewards. Nature Neuroscience, 27(1), 159–175. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01511-4

Goldstein, D. S., & McEwen, B. (2002). Allostasis, homeostats, and the nature of stress. Stress, 5(1), 55–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/102538902900012345

Haynes-LaMotte, A. D. (2025). Affect is the evaluative context for the brain’s shifting goals. Adaptive Behavior, 0(0),1 – 24. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251379013

Higgins, E. T. (2012). Beyond Pleasure and Pain: How Motivation Works. Oxford University Press.

Jackendoff, R. (2012). A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning. Oxford University Press.

Kappes, A., Harvey, A. H., Lohrenz, T., Montague, P. R., & Sharot, T. (2020). Confirmation bias in the utilization of others’ opinion strength. Nature Neuroscience, 23(1), 130–137. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0549-2

Kappes, A., Singmann, H., & Oettingen, G. (2012). Mental contrasting instigates goal pursuit by linking obstacles of reality with instrumental behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(4), 811–818. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2012.02.002

Langens, T. A. (2002). Daydreaming mediates between goal commitment and goal attainment in individuals high in achievement motivation. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 22(2), 103–115. https://doi.org/10.2190/TL8L-MXKE-68E6-UAVB

Tamir, M. (2016). Why do people regulate their emotions? A taxonomy of motives in emotion regulation. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 199–222. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868315586325

Schwartz, B. L., & Pournaghdali, A. (2020). Tip-of-the-tongue states: Past and future. In A. M. Cleary & B. L. Schwartz (Eds.), Memory Quirks: The Study of Odd Phenomena in https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429264498-16

Shaffer, C., Westlin, C., Quigley, K. S., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., & Barrett, L. F. (2022). Allostasis, action, and affect in depression: Insights from the theory of constructed emotion. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 18(1), 553–580. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-clinpsy-081219-115627

Sterling, P. (2012). Allostasis: a model of predictive regulation. Physiology & Behavior, 106(1), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2011.06.004

Van Hoeck, N., Ma, N., Ampe, L., Baetens, K., Vandekerckhove, M., & Van Overwalle, F. (2013). Counterfactual thinking: an fMRI study on changing the past for a better future. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(5), 556–564. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nss031

Withagen, R. (2022). Affective Gibsonian Psychology. Routledge.

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