Mood, The Hidden Aspect of Your Mind

“The key to emotional enlightenment is the knowledge that only your thoughts can affect your moods.” — David D. Burns, psychiatrist

Emotions

Do we control emotions or do they control us? Before considering the issue of control we must define what emotions are. According to Ekkekakis (2012):

“Emotional episodes are elicited by some thing, are reactions to something, and are generally about something, the cognitive appraisal involved in the transaction between person and object is considered a defining element.”

This active definition of emotions allows us to refer to our less tangible feelings as attitudes, moods, or states of mind.

Daniel Goleman is credited with introducing us to the importance of emotion with his 1995 book “Emotional Intelligence.” Goleman is a science writer with an academic training in psychology, he was not a researcher or therapist, he was a publicist. That is to say he understood what people were ready to hear and how to speak to them.

We discuss the importance of emotion now because we were ready to recognize it then, not because anything new was revealed about it in 1995. Emotion’s importance in psychology had been widely discussed a century earlier by William James (1884) in an essay titled “What is an Emotion?” But in those times social attitudes were not open to its recognition.

Goleman popularized practical ways of considering emotion that could be applied to personal relationships, business management, and public education. The term is in common use, but it’s rarely used with any depth of understanding. The importance of emotion has long been recognized, but its nature and effects remain poorly understood (Lange 2020).

Social Acceptance

The idea of emotional expression has become somewhat respectable. Previously, it had connotations of weakness, ineffectiveness, lack of intellect, and femininity. With new academic credentials, which no one particularly knows or cares about, emotion is treated with moderate respect.

The masculine ideal is still the stoic, while the ideal feminine remains emotionally pliant and deferential. I’m referring to Western Culture specifically; other cultures had and have different attitudes toward emotion.

Emotional recognition was part of the populist youth movement of the 60s. It was motivated by political, cultural, and personal dissatisfactions. Issues that could not be addressed intellectually because they had little place in discussions of the time. To address the roots of these issues people needed to express their emotions.

The emotions of anger and frustration were similar across the different groups. These were directed at established norms and control. Emotions were a beachhead on which many people could land their objections.

Like most revolutions, the “emotional revolution” of 1960s through the 1990s, if we can call it that, lacked clear boundaries and had many roots. Now that emotions are respectable, we are likely to explain things in emotional terms. This doesn’t lead to agreement or understanding, but that was not the point.

It became the fashion to think of all emotions as variations on a theme. As if emotions were colors on a spectrum all to be understood by the same underlying physics.

Psychologists administered questionnaires whose rating scales provided numbers that could be called evidence. In truth, this only amounted to evidence that people were manufacturing evidence. Finding the neurological source of emotions became a popular research topic.

Some emotions, like fear and anger, can be located in the brain. Most emotions involve multiple brain structures whose functions are still unclear. More importantly, most emotions are not even distinct things, but are mixtures of feelings, memories, thoughts, and actions.

Moods

Moods are more subtle than emotions. You will not commit violence or marriage just because of your mood. In spite of their differences moods and emotions are connected: if you move one, you’ll move the other.

In a dream, I tossed high into the air a pencil and a turkey vulture and watched them tumbling a hundred feet above me in a blue sky. The vulture flapped its wings to right itself, catching the pencil in its talons before banking steeply to a curving descent. As it came back to me, I reached up and it released the pencil to my hand.

This dream put me in a positive mood. It’s unclear what emotion to associate with it, at least I did not feel any clear emotion. All I could say was that my subsequent emotional state was one of greater calm.

Psychologists distinguish moods from emotions, but the words are carelessly interchanged. What are called “mood disorders,” like depression, bi-polar, and borderline, are clearly using the word “mood” in an undiscriminating way.

When we talk about mood we should be precise. The aforementioned “mood disorders” involve much more than moods. It would be more accurate to call them persistent emotional dysfunctions.

The rise of recognizing emotions is a study in the emergence of a new concept. Now, thirty years later, we’re just starting to recognize the concept of mood. Mood needs to be recognized for the separate thing that it is. However, I don’t think we’re ready for it.

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