Mood

Mood is a sporadic emotional state, and can last for minutes or hours. It indicates emotions manifested through physiological signals (e.g increased heart rate) and behavioural signals (e.g smiling). 

In contrast to emotions, feelings, or affects, moods are less specific, less intense, and less likely to be provoked by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence.

Mood also differs from temperament or personality traits which are even longer-lsating. However, personality traits like optimism and neuroticism do predispose people to certain types of moods. Positive events are more likely to affect the positive mood of extraverts and negative events more likely to influence the negative mood of those low on emotional stability (Tamir & Robinson, 2004).

Mood can be determined by: sleep depreviation, hunger, weather, context, and life events.

Depressive and manic depressive disorders are referred to as mood disorders. Mood is hypothesised to be the main underlying feature of the observed disorder. Examples:

Major depressive disorder (MDD) - mood disorder: characterised by at least 2 weeks of low mood that's present across most situations. It is often accompanied by low self-esteem, loss of interest in normally enjoyable activities, and low energy. Major depression significantly affects a person's family and personal relationships, work or school life, sleeping and eating habits, and general health

Bipolar disorder - mood disorder: also/previously known as manic depression. Causes periods of depression and periods of elevated mood. The elevated mood is significant and known as mania or hypomania, depending on the severity. During mania, the individual behaves or feels abnormally energetic, happy, or irritable. In this time, they may often make poorly thought out decisions that are impulsive and made with little regard to consequences

Positive & negative affect schedule:

• 20 self-report one word items
• patients must rate on a 5-point Likert scale - in regards to if they feel this emotion regularly
• various time schedules used e.g how do you feel in the moment, today, past few days, weeks, year
• increasing test-retest reliability the longer the time period considered

Moods fluctuate across time within people, and mood fluctuations differ between people.

Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA): repeated sampling of current behaviours and/or experiences in real time, in participants' natural context. Minimises recall bias, maximises ecological validity. Observes phenomenon as it occurs and develops. Done using a smartphone.

Largest ecological momentary assessment study to date ("Mappiness") collected around 2 million responses and found that on average, people are significantly happier outdoors in green or natural habitats than in urban environments (MacKerron & Mourato, 2013). Mappiness is recorded on the phone, records what the individual is doing, what the weather is like, if they're doing an activity, and who they're with.