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

I think that these moods as I have defined them are the key way to analyze emotion. If you think about it, thinking about each single emotion is both too simple and too complicated a way to think about someones emotional state. If you could perfectly assess each single emotion then you could see how it all works, but that is impossible considering how many someone has and how complex they are. However, a person might only have a few moods at one time, with many smaller emotions falling under each mood category. For instance someone might have an overall happy mood, a lesser mood from going to school recently, another mood created by a person they just interacted with. This type of analysis simplifies and explains the main types and amount of emotion someone might experience.

What someone thinks is going to influence these moods. For each mood, you are probably going to have thoughts that go along with that mood that possibly try to maintain the mood, diminish it, or cause it to change in some way. A mood might bias your judgments about people or things. Likelihood estimations - the tendency for people to judge probabilities, might also vary based on the state or mood you are in. For all of your thoughts there might be a single unifying theme that would also be the "mood" because the mood is, like I said, the main or primary emotion that all the other individual feelings fall under. That doesn't mean that those individual feelings and thoughts are less intense than the mood, however the mood is likely to last longer while the things that comprise it come and go. I think that means that some moods may not be coherent and easy to label, you could have a mood that could be hard to classify and consist of you experiencing and doing a great variety of things that you would find hard to put into one category. For instance if you had a discussion on a wide variety of topics, you could say that the mood was the mood of a discussion, but you wouldn't be more specific and mention which topic. The topics came and went, but the mood of a conversation stayed.

Two very big components to how someone experiences emotion (and therefore their moods) I would say are their appraisals and their attention for emotional events. Some appraisals include "blameworthiness", "arbitrariness", and "unfairness" of harm (which is relevant because of anger, guilt, and the deserving or not deserving of bad things - and praise in pity, sympathy or envy). So that means that people really care about what happens to them, and they get very emotional about it. Even if they aren't the emotional type, the principals of blaming, being arbitrary, attributing fairness, and feeling guilt, anger, sympathy and envy all apply greatly to people. These things are the cause for major emotional intensity, whether this intensity is obvious or not, it is still always there and would show up in certain ways. In fact, I would say that there is a comprehensive assessment system that people use for everything that occurs, and this assessment is there in a big way, influencing what the emotions people experience are, what their expectations are, what they want the other person to feel and what they think the feelings are its going to result in. That is why I mentioned attention for emotional events, because these processes are going to be so strong they are also therefore going to have a major impact on your attention, even if it is mostly an emotional kind of attention (things your emotions are "paying attention to").

Moods might not seem as intense as those intense emotions that I just described related to appraisals and attention. Moods and someones thought process related to the moods seem like minor things compared to the passionate, intense appraisals and back and forth interpersonal warfare that occurs with people. The emotions are deep and powerful, and thought with light moods would be the opposite.

But moods are hardly ever "light" - people feel strongly about specific things, which would cause strong specific emotions, but they can also feel strongly in a more general sort of way, which would be their mood. The specific feelings you have can be strong and short lived, but these all add up to what your mood is most of the time. When you are just hanging around, your emotions contributed to what you are feeling at that moment. You probably had a large number of possibly very strong emotions recently, all these contributed to a few feelings you have currently that you can feel. For instance if you feel relaxed, it is possible that the other emotions you experienced throughout the day contributed to this relaxed feeling you are currently experiencing.

Does this mean that someone is always in at least one of the moods from the HUMAINE classification (the negative and forceful, positive and lively, etc groupings)? How could someone describe their mood at any one moment? Is it necessary to do an analysis of what occurred in your life recently in order to figure out what you are currently feeling? I would think that clearly doing such an analysis would help. I wouldn't think that if you thought a lot more about how you were feeling you would understand less well what you were feeling, though I suppose that is possible.