Mood
Mood
MOOD, PHYSIOLOGY, AND BEHAVIOR
The systematic study of mood has received attention from a broad variety of social scientists. For example, social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychologists have reasons for working to understand how people develop, experience, and respond to certain moods. Social psychologists may be interested in investigating how good or bad moods influence social interaction patterns. Personality psychologists may be interested in investigating how certain personality types may predict people’s tendencies to experience certain moods. Alternately, cognitive psychologists may be more interested in examining how mood influences decision-making processes. Clinical psychologists may, in turn, be more interested in studying how mood disorders are manifest. Due to the wide appeal of investigation of people’s moods, the study of mood has enjoyed a long and productive history. The subdomains of psychology approach the study of mood as well as its causes, effects, and correlates in different ways. Social psychologists have typically studied moods through laboratory manipulations, which induce short-term state changes. Personality and clinical psychologists typically explore mood-related phenomena through the use of self-report instruments, interviews, and observational methods designed to assess both state variations and trait-anchored propensities.
Mood may be conceptualized along several dimensions: dimensions of valence, negative to positive; strength, weak to strong; and arousal, not aroused to aroused. Examples of moods include happiness, sadness, excitement, nervousness, and calmness. A given mood may persist for short amounts of time (e.g., a few hours) to relatively long amounts of time (e.g., a few weeks). Mood differs from related psychological experiences, such as affect, attitude, emotion, and temperament, in several key ways. Affect refers to people’s “good” or “bad” cognitive appraisals of attitude objects. Emotion and mood both exist as affective states, “by-products” of positive or negative appraisals of experiences or objects. However, mood differs from emotion in that mood is usually experienced as a diffuse state that is often not readily perceived as attributable to any given attitude object. In contrast, emotion is most often perceived as the result of a discrete experience. For example, a person might not be aware that he or she is in a good mood because the person anticipates receiving a paycheck the following day. This same person might also be acutely aware that he or she is, potentially at the same time, experiencing the emotion of happiness due to a recent engagement for marriage.
Whereas emotion and mood are most often the results of affective responses, attitude and temperament influence affective response patterns. That is, attitude and temperament play a role in how people evaluate events or objects whereas emotion and mood result from these evaluations. Though attitude is more readily distinguished from mood, how people evaluate attitude objects most assuredly differs from the mood that they may experience as a result, the distinction between mood and temperament is less clear. For example, it may be difficult to determine whether or not a person is merely in a sad mood or whether he or she is clinically depressed. Both the mood and temperament of depression, or dysphoria, may have similar symptoms to the observer (i.e., lethargy, crying, irritability). Accordingly, the most useful rule of thumb may be to conceptualize temperament as a lasting, relatively stable personality trait and mood as a shorter-lived, more dynamic psychological state.
MOOD AND COGNITION
Though a given mood might not persist for a very long time, it influences how people perceive and make sense of the world around them. An impressive body of research suggests that people who are in positive moods may be more likely to use cognitive shortcuts, relying on general and idiographic heuristics, than people who are in negative moods. Alternately people who are in negative moods may be more likely to use information in their environment rather than rely on heuristics to make their decisions. Interestingly, as a result, people in positive moods may be more susceptible to persuasive appeals and more likely to engage in stereotyping than people in negative moods.
Additionally mood may influence people’s memories for certain situations. More specifically, being in a particular mood (e.g., surprised) may prompt a person to recall other times during which he or she experienced the relevant mood strongly (e.g., a surprise birthday party). Correspondingly, being in or recalling a situation that evoked strong affective responses (e.g., watching the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on television) may evoke associated moods, such as fear.
Furthermore mood may provide people with information concerning how they should manage or respond to cues in their environments. For example, a popular theory of self-esteem, sociometer theory, posits that negative mood may signal to a person that he or she is being excluded or rejected. An increase in negative mood may alert the rejected person that he or she is being devalued in a social interaction and that he or she should do something interpersonally (e.g., flatter the rejector) or intrapersonally (e.g., artificially inflate reported self-evaluations) in order to maintain positive self-worth.
MOOD, PHYSIOLOGY, AND BEHAVIOR
In addition to its influences on cognition, mood is also associated with certain patterns of physiological responding. Brain imaging studies have revealed that, though affective and nonaffective centers in the brain share common components, differences between these areas exist, indicating that structures associated with affective responding are distinct from those not associated with affective responding. Moreover, positive affect and negative affect may share neural processes indicating that people may have the capacity to experience both positive and negative affect at the same time.
Although the possibility that one can simultaneously experience, for example, pleasure and pain, exists, the bulk of research examining the influence of mood on physiology and vice versa suggests that positive and negative moods are associated with distinct patterns of brain activation and corresponding arousal and behavior patterns. More specifically, good mood is associated with varying levels of positive arousal whereas bad mood is associated with varying levels of negative arousal. Stated differently, positive mood fosters approach behaviors, whereas negative mood fosters withdrawal behaviors.
The experience of negative mood may be so aversive that, not only do people seek to avoid it, they may also take potentially harmful behaviors in an attempt to overcome it. People who are in bad moods are more likely to make decisions that are self-serving in the present rather than the future, making riskier decisions than people in better moods.
In contrast, being in a good mood is associated with a variety of more positive behaviors. For example, people in positive moods are more inclined to help others. They are also more likely to respond to tasks and problems with more creative approaches than people who are in bad moods.
SUMMARY
Mood exists as a response to the processing of internal and external affective stimuli. The study of mood draws the intellectual attention of a variety of social scientists. Correspondingly, research has revealed that mood influences both cognition and behavior. Moreover, there are both biological and neurobiological correlates of mood. In general, people in good moods evidence a variety of positive outcomes and behaviors relative to those who are in bad moods. Being in a good mood may come with some costs, however. Most centrally, people who are in good moods may be less likely than those who are in bad moods to critically process persuasive information.
SEE ALSO Attitudes; Emotion; Temperament
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Jorgianne Civey Robinson