0.7 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 24/26)

I can express it in a way that makes it more clear. You can have a strong emotion for a brief period of time but such an emotion would be too strong to sustain for longer than that. A mood, however, you can sustain and have as a minor distraction, only a part of your feelings, for a while. You wouldn't want your mood to dominate your feelings while at an event, a mood is just a sort of like feel for whatever it is you are doing or feeling - it is not the primary feeling. The primary feelings people experience are the emotions that occur on a moment to moment basis. Some of those emotions are longer lasting that other emotions, but none of them would be a long lasting as a few hours, which would be your temporary mood. No one rages on and on for hours, though a mad man may. Such a case might be considered the emotion "rage" occurring for hours, however that is iffy. A mood can clearly last a few hours, and I suppose an emotion could too - however that would be hard to measure. You know what your mood is and how long it lasts, you couldn't possibly know how long all the longer-lasting single emotions you have are.

I mean, how could someone know if they maintained the emotion "vigilance" or "disgust" for a few hours? They might know they were vigilant or disgusted for a few hours, but that might be hard to identify or rare in occurrence. People have moods all the time however, so my guess is it is a lot more likely someone is able to identify what their moods are. Moods are more obvious because they are composed of groups of related emotions and feelings (the HUMAINE categorization in part 2). "Negative and forceful" and "positive and lively" would probably be obvious to someone if it occurred. However, say someone experienced the emotion envy, it might be hard to assess if that emotion hangs around in them for a few hours. It would be easier to assess if the emotion group that envy is in - which is "negative thoughts" (HUMAINE again) occurred for a few hours. That would be easier to feel and identify. In that way moods are stronger than emotions, however they aren't stronger than brief, single emotions that have a more easily identifiable cause.

You might be confused at this point because I have outlined both how moods are stronger than emotions, and how they are weaker than them. Moods are composed of a set of feelings and emotions, that is why they are stronger than one of those single emotions by itself. However, in a shorter time period, one of those emotions could be stronger than the overall mood. It is really a matter of your perception and what feels stronger to you. It could be that one of the single emotions that makes up the mood is stronger than the mood itself - though that wouldn't seem to make sense to me.

By the way, there are more moods than the categorizations in the HUMAINE system (though they didn't even intend for those to be viewed that way). You could have your own personal mood that you come up with that has its own set of emotions if you want.