0.7 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 8/26)

I know that my reply basically went from stating in order to measure emotion only assess significant factors, to saying the opposite of that (asses the small factors). I think the significant factors are going to show up as the small factors as well, however. If you think about it, maybe the feeling of happiness for going to the park only start in a series of tone (feeling) changes once you walk into the park - and then could stay at that level of happiness after you are in it. For example maybe once you see the park your happiness would go up a little, then after you enter a little more, then after see something a little more - that is just a guess as to how these small changes might play out. I think they might be able to be observed because people can notice changes in the tone of a conversation, why not changes in the tones of everyday feelings? All those small changes contribute to the larger, more significant feelings in some way.

I don't know exactly how all the small feelings play out in everyday life. My guess would be that it is incredibly complex, experiencing many feelings (that are at least slightly noticeable) every hour. You might only describe one large feeling as taking place over an hour, or if it something like pain the large feeling could occur for the minute you had the pain. I don't know what a large feeling would be that only lasts a minute other than the feeling of pain, which can be large in a very short time period like a minute or a second. It would seem that the emotion of happy can only be large over a long period of time, like if you were happy for an hour or a day you could say that the feeling there was large because it lasted so long. I don't know how someone could say, "I felt a large happy feeling for a couple or seconds or minutes". That is why it might be hard to notice how all the small changes work and add up to the larger feeling of happiness throughout the day. Because these minor changes in feeling might be hard to notice, but probably still occur a lot. Like when you said the person perked up when he got a call from a friend, that is an example of a small change in emotion that only lasted a brief period of time. Him perking up was a positive emotion that lasted a few seconds that probably made him happier for a longer period of time. I think I can describe these small changes by saying something a little silly - that you can label every little thing that happens in life as positive or negative, or with any description of feeling or an emotion. You might get a little envious and not even notice it, but would still be there as a change in your attitude that occurred suddenly. Or anything really, whenever someone says anything that indicated that emotion was felt (like the baseball game was fun, or when they hit the rock it was annoying) you can take that and analyze it in a larger context of feelings - of how the small and large feelings play out. I think these minute changes occur all of the time and contribute to larger feelings and how the other minute changes play out.