Abstract: Beliefs of being in control are central to human affective experience, self-esteem and well-being. Recently, human affective neuroscience has embraced the long-standing psychological interest in control beliefs, characterizing the subjective value of control beliefs, their underlying computations, and their neural implementation. Here, we consider four critical elements of control: the availability of choices, internal causation, local confidence, and generalization. We define each of these elements and illustrate how they can be assessed experimentally – and use this rough outline to embed pointers to the remaining talks of the lecture series. Further, we exemplify the interplay of different elements of beliefs about control by discussing studies on internal causation and generalization, regarding their neural underpinnings and links with affective valuation with regard to both momentary (local) experiences and broader (global) self-evaluations.

Webex Link: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=m46d6f1f9235bb4386609631f66655be6