Quantitative Biology

Stochastic Transitions Between Neutral and Bimodal Affective States Under Contradictory Stimulation

Authors: Renato Vieira dos Santos
Comments: 11 Pages. Published in EPJ B

Contemporary information environments expose individuals to streams of messages that alternate rapidly between positive and negative affective valences, a condition we term contradictory stimulation. What are the long-term consequences of such structured inconsistency on an individual's core affective state? The difficulty lies in representing the pattern of contradiction, rather than the content of any single message, within a mathematically tractable framework. We approach this problem by treating the strength of external influence as a stochastic parameter, thereby converting a deterministic homeostatic model of affect into a stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. The resulting stationary distribution reveals two distinct regimes separated by a critical boundary in parameter space: a unimodal regime centered at affective neutrality, emerging when the noise intensity exceeds a threshold, and a bimodal regime corresponding to affective instability, where the distribution exhibits two well-separated peaks. We map the phase diagram in the parameter space and identify an island of bimodality for intermediate regulatory capacity, as well as a lock-in region for near-neutral default bias. These findings offer a minimal, analytically transparent mechanism through which the statistical architecture of an information environment, independent of any specific content, can shape the qualitative form of affective experience.
Category: Quantitative Biology