Understanding the dynamics of our emotional lives has proven a complex
challenge, but one that has benefited greatly from recent methodological
and technological developments. Based on high intensity affective data and
statistical mechanics, Loossens et al. (in press) have proposed a
computational model to capture these complexities. The Affective Ising
Model (AIM) describes the dynamics of positive and negative affect, and can
capture nonlinear, non-Gaussian tendencies in the data. However, contextual
information has not yet been integrated into the model. We propose an
experimental paradigm to elicit affective fluctuations within known
contextual conditions and test the model's ability to capture affective
dynamics in context. Participants engage in a simple gambling task with
real monetary rewards, and report on their affective state between trials