In psychology, a mood is an affective state. In contrast to emotions or feelings, moods are less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence. In other words, people usually talk about being in a good mood or a bad mood. There are many different factors that influence mood, and these can lead to positive or negative effects on mood.
Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.
Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.
Mood congruence is the consistency between a person's emotional state with the broader situations and circumstances being experienced by the persons at that time. By contrast, mood incongruence occurs when the individual's reactions or emotional state appear to be in conflict with the situation. In the context of psychosis, hallucinations and delusions may be considered mood congruent or incongruent.
Emotionality is the observable behavioral and physiological component of emotion. It is a measure of a person's emotional reactivity to a stimulus. Most of these responses can be observed by other people, while some emotional responses can only be observed by the person experiencing them. Observable responses to emotion do not have a single meaning. A smile can be used to express happiness or anxiety, while a frown can communicate sadness or anger. Emotionality is often used by experimental psychology researchers to operationalize emotion in research studies.
Evolutionary approaches to depression are attempts by evolutionary psychologists to use the theory of evolution to shed light on the problem of mood disorders within the perspective of evolutionary psychiatry. Depression is generally thought of as dysfunction or a mental disorder, but its prevalence does not increase with age the way dementia and other organic dysfunction commonly does. Some researchers have surmised that the disorder may have evolutionary roots, in the same way that others suggest evolutionary contributions to schizophrenia, sickle cell anemia, psychopathy and other disorders. Psychology and psychiatry have not generally embraced evolutionary explanations for behaviors, and the proposed explanations for the evolution of depression remain controversial.
Affect displays are the verbal and non-verbal displays of affect (emotion). These displays can be through facial expressions, gestures and body language, volume and tone of voice, laughing, crying, etc. Affect displays can be altered or faked so one may appear one way, when they feel another. Affect can be conscious or non-conscious and can be discreet or obvious. The display of positive emotions, such as smiling, laughing, etc., is termed "positive affect", while the displays of more negative emotions, such as crying and tense gestures, is respectively termed "negative affect".
The Affect infusion model (AIM) is a theoretical model in the field of human psychology. Developed by social psychologist Joseph Paul Forgas in the early 1990s, it attempts to explain how affect impacts one's ability to process information. A key assertion of the AIM is that the effects of affect tend to be exacerbated in complex situations that demand substantial cognitive processing. In simpler words, as situations become more complicated and unanticipated, mood becomes more influential in driving evaluations and responses.
Rumination is the focused attention on the symptoms of one's distress, and on its possible causes and consequences, as opposed to its solutions, according to the Response Styles Theory proposed by Nolen-Hoeksema (1998).
Negative affectivity (NA), or negative affect, is a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Low negative affectivity is characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence, activeness, and great enthusiasm.
Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic and semantic memory. It is thus a type of explicit memory.
In psychology, context-dependent memory is the improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same. In a simpler manner, "when events are represented in memory, contextual information is stored along with memory targets; the context can therefore cue memories containing that contextual information". One particularly common example of context-dependence at work occurs when an individual has lost an item in an unknown location. Typically, people try to systematically "retrace their steps" to determine all of the possible places where the item might be located. Based on the role that context plays in determining recall, it is not at all surprising that individuals often quite easily discover the lost item upon returning to the correct context. This concept is heavily related to the encoding specificity principle.
Affect measures are used in the study of human affect, and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.
Paula M. Niedenthal is a social psychologist currently working as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She also completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where she received a Bachelor's in Psychology. She then received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan before becoming a faculty member of the departments of Psychology at Johns Hopkins University and Indiana University. Until recently, she served as the Director of Research in the National Centre for Scientific Research at the Université Blaise Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand France. The majority of Niedenthal's research focuses on several levels of analysis of emotional processes, this would include emotion-cognition interaction and representational models of emotion. Niedenthal has authored more than 80 articles and chapters, and several books. Niedenthal is a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Meta-mood is a term used by psychologists to refer to an individual's awareness of their emotions. The term was first utilized by John D. Mayer and Peter Salovey who believed the experience of mood involved "direct" and "indirect" components. While the direct level refers to the simple appearance of mood - happiness, fear, anger, sadness, and surprise, the indirect level, or the meta-mood experience, does not solely consist of the emotions experienced by an individual in the moment. Rather, it is a reflective state which involves additional thoughts and feelings about the mood itself. "I shouldn’t feel this way" or "I am thinking of ways to improve my mood" are examples of reflective thoughts during a meta-mood experience.
Mnemic neglect is a term used in social psychology to describe a pattern of selective forgetting in which certain autobiographical memories tend to be recalled more easily if they are consistent with positive self-concept. The mnemic neglect model stipulates that memory is self-protective if the information is negative, self-referent, and concerns central traits.
A cognitive vulnerability in cognitive psychology is an erroneous belief, cognitive bias, or pattern of thought that predisposes an individual to psychological problems. The vulnerability exists before the symptoms of a psychological disorder appear. After the individual encounters a stressful experience, the cognitive vulnerability shapes a maladaptive response that increases the likelihood of a psychological disorder.
The fading affect bias, more commonly known as FAB, is a psychological phenomenon in which memories associated with negative emotions tend to be forgotten more quickly than those associated with positive emotions. It is important to note that FAB only refers to the feelings one has associated with the memories and not the content of the memories themselves. Early research studied FAB retrospectively, or through personal reflection, which brought about some criticism because retrospective analysis can be affected by subjective retrospective biases. However, new research using non-retrospective recall studies have found evidence for FAB., and the phenomenon has become largely accepted.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
Watson and Clark (1991) proposed the Tripartite Model of Anxiety and Depression to help explain the comorbidity between anxious and depressive symptoms and disorders. This model divides the symptoms of anxiety and depression into three groups: negative affect, positive affect and physiological hyperarousal. These three sets of symptoms help explain common and distinct aspects of depression and anxiety.
