Certainty is a meta-cognitive feeling that has been described as affective in nature

Humans and other animals trade other rewards and punishments for a greater sense of certainty

Certainty and reward are represented in the brain using a common neural code

People manage their affect by both seeking and rejecting a sense of certainty in different situations

At every moment there is something a person/animal is trying to do (a goal) and a reason they are trying to do it (a context for that goal). In the Affect Management Framework (AMF; Haynes-LaMotte, 2025), contextualized goals are constantly shifting in the brain, informed by the senses of the world and the body (vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, interoception, and proprioception) as well as the semantic factors of meaningfulness, certainty, and agency.

Because our affect is attached to our goals, what contextualized goals we take on and how and when we choose to pursue or relinquish across similar situations can be described as different affect management policies.

In this post, I hope to expand upon the affective side of certainty as described in the AMF:

Certainty represents an important aspect of all brain function, based on the notion that the brain implements ongoing hierarchical Bayesian estimation across sensory modalities and that this process of best-guessing gives rise to conscious experience (Barrett, 2017; Clark, 2023). A sense of certainty/uncertainty has been described as a meta-cognitive feeling that is part of conscious affective experience (Loev, 2022; Velasco & Loev, 2024).

Certainty is often required to construct the meaningful goals that impact momentary affect. For instance, rules to a board game or sport operate as bits of certainty that give the outcome meaning in the absence of major consequences that otherwise would provide that meaning. Generally speaking, a sense of certainty allows animals to invest their efforts in worthwhile goals that are likely to be successful.

There are several pieces of evidence suggesting that a sense of certainty is part of the affective common currency of the mind. For example, studies among humans, monkeys, and other animals have found that they give up some of their material rewards for informational gain that has no clear instrumental value (for a review, see Bromberg-Martin et al., 2024), and that informational value and other kinds of reward are represented in the brain using a common neural code (Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2009; Bromberg-Martin & Hikosaka, 2011; Kobayashi & Hsu, 2019).

Resolving uncertainty into certainty is often an affectively positive experience: A sense of uncertainty creates a kind of affective itch that is scratched by learning more, such as when tabloid magazines capture people’s attention by introducing questions that are otherwise of no material relevance to them. Consistent with this, a study by Bode and colleagues (2023) found that participants opted to receive painful shocks in exchange for faster information about the outcomes of a coin flip. The coin flip determined between two monetary prizes, both of which would be a modest net gain, and participants knew that receiving the information faster would not impact the outcome.

This study indicates that gaining certainty comes with an affective benefit that seems worth the interoceptive pain of the shocks, and more importantly that the two can be weighed against one another via the evaluative common currency of affect.

The affective draw of certainty is also a key factor in the addictive nature of gambling, where resolving the momentary uncertainty about winning or losing into certainty is a major aspect of the reward value of the experience (Zack, George, & Clark, 2020).

Other research emphasizes the close connection between affect and certainty. A study by Chetverikov and Filippova (2014) had participants categorize degraded images and later had them rate how much they liked each one. They found that participants liked the images they were able to perceive correctly more than the others.

Further support comes from a pair of studies by Voodla, Uusberg, and Desender (2025) that tracked how certainty and subjective affective state changed over the course of a decisional task. They found across samples that both confidence and affective state were strongly correlated with one another, and both seemed to reflect the subjective probability that participants’ decisions in the task were correct.

This subjective probability was operationalized as a combination of accuracy on the task, the amount of evidence participants had about their decisions, and their expectancies about trial difficulty. Notably, in this study, a sense of certainty was only explored in the context of goal-congruence. That is, the participants ostensibly wanted to do well on the tasks, and so more confidence would reflect how well someone believes they are doing with that goal.

In other situations, remaining uncertain seems to be the desired affective state. For example, people avoid otherwise useful information because of how it would feel to receive it, such as refraining from medical screening in order to not receive bad news or having to act upon it (Golman & Lowenstein, 2018).

Related to this phenomenon, Sharot and Sunstein (2020) suggest that people decide whether they want to know information (i.e., increase certainty) for three separate motives: (1) to select appropriate actions, (2) to improve their mood, and (3) to improve their mental model of the world (e.g., learning about things one is interested in, even when it has no instrumental value).

Subsequently, a study by Kelly and Sharot (2021) testing this idea found that these three motives did uniquely account for the perceived value of information, explaining its pursuit or avoidance. Additionally, they found that people exhibited tendencies to value one of these motives above the others, and that these tendencies were stable over time.

Other support for this idea comes from the concept of cognitive dissonance (Harmon-Jones, 2019), in which processing two competing or mutually exclusive facts leads to a negative affective state. In their review of relevant research on the concept, Kruglanski and colleagues (2018) point out that, rather than having a general need for cognitive consistency, humans experience cognitive dissonance when there is a threat to the certainty of information relevant for acting toward important goals.

From the perspective of the AMF, each of the three factors outlined by Sharot and Sunstein (2020) is related back to affective processes via either goals (i.e., selecting appropriate action), meaningfulness (i.e., improving mental model for certain concepts), or anticipating the immediate effects of actions using affect as the way of evaluating (i.e., improving mood).

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan.

Bode, S., Sun, X., Jiwa, M., Cooper, P. S., Chong, T. T. J., & Egorova-Brumley, N. (2023). When knowledge hurts: Humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290(2002), 20231175. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2023.1175

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., Feng, Y. Y., Ogasawara, T., White, J. K., Zhang, K., & Monosov, I. E. (2024). A neural mechanism for conserved value computations integrating information and rewards. Nature Neuroscience, 27(1), 159-175. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01511-4

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., & Hikosaka, O. (2009). Midbrain dopamine neurons signal preference for advance information about upcoming rewards. Neuron, 63(1), 119-126. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2009.06.009

Bromberg-Martin, E. S., & Hikosaka, O. (2011). Lateral habenula neurons signal errors in the prediction of reward information. Nature Neuroscience, 14(9), 1209-1216. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2902

Chetverikov, A., & Filippova, M. (2014). How to tell a wife from a hat: Affective feedback in perceptual categorization. Acta Psychologica, 151, 206-213. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2014.06.012

Clark, A. (2023). The experience machine: How our minds predict and shape reality. Random House.

Golman, R., & Loewenstein, G. (2018). Information gaps: A theory of preferences regarding the presence and absence of information. Decision, 5(3), 143–164. https://doi.org/10.1037/dec0000068

Harmon-Jones, E. E. (2019). Cognitive dissonance: Reexamining a pivotal theory in psychology. American Psychological Association.

Haynes-LaMotte, A. D. (2025). Affect is the evaluative context for the brain’s shifting goals. Adaptive Behavior, 0(0),1 – 24. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251379013

Kelly, C. A., & Sharot, T. (2021). Individual differences in information-seeking. Nature Communications, 12(1), 7062. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27046-5

Kobayashi, K., & Hsu, M. (2019). Common neural code for reward and information value. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(26), 13061-13066. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820145116

Kruglanski, A. W., Jasko, K., Milyavsky, M., Chernikova, M., Webber, D., Pierro, A., & Di Santo, D. (2018). Cognitive consistency theory in social psychology: A paradigm reconsidered. Psychological Inquiry, 29(2), 45-59. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2018.1480619

Loev, S. (2022). Epistemic feelings are affective experiences. Emotion Review, 14(3), 206-216. https://doi.org/10.1177/175407392211044

Sharot, T., & Sunstein, C. R. (2020). How people decide what they want to know. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(1), 14-19. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0793-1

Velasco, P. F., & Loev, S. (2024). Metacognitive feelings: a predictive-processing perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17456916231221976. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231221976

Voodla, A., Uusberg, A., & Desender, K. (2025). Metacognitive confidence and affect–two sides of the same coin? Cognition and Emotion, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2025.2451795

Zack, M., George, R. S., & Clark, L. (2020). Dopaminergic signaling of uncertainty and the aetiology of gambling addiction. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, 99, 109853. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnpbp.2019.109853

© Psychology Today