Key points

• The Affect Management Framework highlights that affect is attached to our (meaningful) goals.
• Mind-wandering represents the creation of novel goals from this perspective.
• Affect and goals work reciprocally: affect tracks goal progress, and goals determine desired affective states.

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.

Affect is Attached to (Meaningful) Goals

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 satisfying videos” on affect, where viewing the action in the video (e.g., a window washer perfectly cleaning a window) seems to create a goal in that moment that is then quickly and completely satisfied, leading to a positive affective experience.

A Consideration of Multitasking

Having a goal can be (but is not necessarily) a positively valenced experience, and having multiple goals at the same time (i.e., multitasking or dual-tasking) has a similarly contextual relationship with affect. Studies have found both positive (Wang & Tchernev, 2012) and negative (Kirchberg, Roe, Van Eerde, 2015) associations between multitasking and affective valence, and a study by Bachmann, Grunschel, and Fries (2019) found that the relationship between affective valence and multitasking was moderated by whether the additional activity was voluntarily motivated or not: it was associated with positive affect when the additional activity was voluntarily motivated, and associated with negative affect in the absence of this feature.

Two reasons multitasking may be a negative affective experience are (1) accurate recognition that performance is generally worse when multitasking (May & Elder, 2018; Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009), and (2) the fact that multitasking tends to activate the physiological stress response (Becker, Kaltenegger, Nowak, Weigl, & Rohleder, 2023).

Alternatively, three reasons multitasking may be a positive affective experience are that (1) the aforementioned physiological response could be positively evaluated, making the interoceptive experience a positive one (Schacter & Singer, 1962; Dutton & Aron, 1974; White, Fishbein, & Rutstein, 1981); that (2) particular activities people do when multitasking (e.g., social media) are ones that deliver new, interesting, and clarifying information at a rate faster than what humans’ evolution-honed brains historically found in the environment (Meshi, Tamir, & Heekeren, 2015; Westbrook et al., 2021); and that (3) multitasking may be an attempt to prevent one’s mind from wandering and the negative affective consequences that brings (Ralph, Smith, Seli, & Smilek, 2020). For example, a study by Wilson and colleagues (2014) found that 67% of men and 25% of women opted to give themselves electric shocks rather than be left alone with their thoughts.

Emotions Essential Reads

A Reciprocal Relationship

From the perspective of the AMF, interoception cannot on its own account for the way people manage their affect because it can always be re-contextualized by someone’s goals or expectations. For instance, feeling tired when there is much more to do is affectively negative, but feeling tired and having the whole morning to sleep in is affectively positive. Similarly, someone could feel excited when they get hungry (which is typically described as an interoceptive error signal) because they were waiting to get hungry to order their favorite meal.

In this way, the relationship between affect and goals is reciprocal: while affect reflects perceived progress toward meaningful goals, contextualized goals can also determine desired affective states. Research evidence of this includes studies finding that people prefer feeling sad when they’re going to ask someone for help (Hackenbract & Tamir, 2010), prefer feeling angry when they’re going to confront someone (Tamir, Mitchell, & Gross, 2008), and prefer feeling afraid when their goal is avoiding something (Tamir & Ford, 2009).

Thus, sometimes affective states themselves are viewed by the brain as resources useful for achieving goals, which would then presumably bring positive affective benefits. This idea is further in line with the AMF principles that affect management is anticipatory, multifaceted, and contextual. The ever-shifting goals of the brain are contextualized and informed by ongoing interoceptive, semantic, exteroceptive, and proprioceptive processes, and each of these has the ability to sway the evaluative common currency of affect in conscious experience. In the following posts, I will explore each of these sources of affect in more detail.

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