Do Past Experiences Influence Your Current Mood?

Want to cheer yourself up? It's time to forget about your negative past experiences. Researchers now say that it is the past experience and not the recent ones that hold you back from being happy if you constantly have bad moods.

Hanna Keren, a postdoctoral research fellow, and her colleagues at the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) provided fresh insights into the impact of early events on the mood of individuals.

‘Past experiences can activate segments of the frontal brain linked to moods. They can strongly influence the current mood of people regardless of their mental health condition.’

The team first designed two computational models: the primacy model and the other one was the recency model. The former was based on the concept that previous experiences influence an individual's current mood than the recent ones. In contrast, the latter was built based on the assumption that mostly the recent experiences affect the mood.

Then they enrolled a group of adults and a group of teens in an online gambling game. The adult participants reported their moods during the game through a sliding scale, whereas the teens underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate their brain activity. Data regarding their mental health status were also collected.

Finally, when correlating the data from computational models and reports from real people, they found that early experiences in the life of an individual had the most substantial impact on the mood of both the adult and teen subjects regardless of their mental health status. The imaging experiment also revealed that the parts of the frontal brain associated with moods were activated by the earlier experiences in the game.

The researchers highlight that their findings could pave the way to arrive at the solutions that can help healthcare professionals treat patients with mood disorders effectively.



Source: Medindia