How mood tunes prediction: a neurophenomenological account of mood and its disturbance in major depression

Abstract

In this article, we propose a neurophenomenological account of what moods are, and how they work. We draw upon phenomenology to show how mood attunes a person to a space of significant possibilities. Mood structures a person’s lived experience by fixing the kinds of significance the world can have for them in a given situation. We employ Karl Friston’s free-energy principle to show how this phenomenological concept of mood can be smoothly integrated with cognitive neuroscience. We will argue that mood is a consequence of acting in the world with the aim of minimizing expected free energy—a measure of uncertainty about the future consequences of actions. Moods summarize how the organism is faring overall in its predictive engagements, tuning the organism’s expectations about how it is likely to fare in the future. Agents that act to minimize expected free energy will have a feeling of how well or badly they are doing at maintaining grip on the multiple possibilities that matter to them. They will have what we will call a ‘feeling of grip’ that structures the possibilities they are ready to engage with over long time-scales, just as moods do.

Consciousness in active inference: Deep self-models, other minds, and the challenge of psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution

“…fulfilling prior preferences and resolving uncertainty ( Joffily and Coricelli 2013 ; Seth and Friston 2016 ; Kiverstein et al. 2019 , 2020 ). This contextually flexible evaluation of model fitness is essential for organisms to persist and perform adaptive actions in volatile environments.…”

“…(2020) suggest that a sensitivity to worse than expected rates of prediction error reduction over time ( Kiverstein et al. 2017 , 2020 ; Hesp et al. 2021 ), manifesting phenomenologically as negative affect, drives the system to switch to more tractable goals.…”

The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being

“…Our recent work continues this tradition in emotion theory by highlighting the role of doing better than expected at error reduction in precision estimation (Kiverstein et al, 2019(Kiverstein et al, , 2020; see also Hesp et al, 2021). Unexpected increases or decreases in volatility are good information for the agent about how confident they can be that an action policy will lead to expected outcomes.…”

Osteopathy and Mental Health: An Embodied, Predictive, and Interoceptive Framework

“…Today, the free-energy principle is widely considered a unifying theory, aiming to explain the brain and the dynamics of all living systems ( Ramstead et al, 2018 ). According to the free-energy principle, all living, biological, self–organizing, and adaptive systems, which can be demarcated from their surroundings (including cells, brains, humans, and even societies), resist a tendency to disorder (dispersion by random fluctuations) and try to remain in (thermodynamic) non-equilibrium steady–states by restricting themselves to a limited number of states through the minimization of free energy ( Friston, 2009 , 2019 ; Hipolito, 2019 ; Kiverstein et al, 2020 ; Limanowski and Friston, 2020 ). Herein, free energy is defined as the difference between a system predicted state and their actual state.…”