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Moods in Layers

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Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine moods, mostly in comparison to emotions. Nearly all of the features that allegedly distinguish moods from emotions are disputed though. In a first section I comment on duration, intentionality, and cause in more detail, and develop intentionality as the most promising distinguishing characteristic. In a second section I will consider the huge variety of moods, ranging from shallow environmentally triggered transient moods to deep existential moods that last much longer. I will explore what their sources are, and how they impact one another, other affective processes, and our being in the world. I follow several eminent emotion researchers and try to carve out their insights, many seemingly mutually excluding each other. As it will turn out, most of them are, in fact, not excluding each other, but contribute to a layered picture of moods that fits well in between emotions and personality traits. Eventually, I will shortly discuss what we can do with our moods.

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Notes

  1. Of almost sixty authors only four are philosophers, the others are from various fields of psychology and psychiatry.

  2. Bear in mind the ambiguities of the terms “emotion” and “emotion episode”, though. Scherer and Ekman identify emotions with emotion episodes that last only for seconds, Frijda, in contrast, refers to emotion episodes as longer lasting processes that comprise sequences of emotions (of the Scherer-Ekman type).

  3. Though duration is not the mark to distinguish between emotions and moods, in general, it can be one of the criteria for distinguishing quality-related exemplars of the two. Thus, being in an irascible mood typically lasts longer than responding angrily or annoyingly in a given situation.

  4. Whether emotions have both directions of fit is controversial, though. While some claim emotions have no direction of fit at all (e.g., Searle 1994, 382) others admit, at best, a mind-to-world direction of fit (e.g. Döring 2007, 384).

  5. There are exceptions, though. The success of emotionally motivated actions does not necessarily mean that emotions are regulated and that they fade away. In love, for example, it is often the opposite. Successful actions do not imply that love fades—on the contrary, they enhance love. (I owe this observation to an anonymous referee.)

  6. For more details, see Slaby and Stephan 2008. Though, when discussing fear, Heidegger (1927, § 30) distinguished between what we are afraid of (das Wovor der Furcht), being in an attitude of fear (das Fürchten), and who we are afraid for (das Worum der Furcht). —Referring to Heidegger here, and in Footnote 12, has nothing to do with his antisemitism, especially the view that is manifested in the Schwarze Hefte.

  7. The original text reads: “Die Stimmungen [...] sind Zuständlichkeiten, Färbungen des gesamten menschlichen Daseins, in denen das Ich seiner selbst in einer bestimmten Weise unmittelbar inne wird, die aber nicht auf etwas außer ihnen Liegendes hinausverweisen.“

  8. According to Beedy et al. “intentionality” ranks at the third place as a distinguishing feature between moods and emotions (though second among academics): “13% of respondents cited the object-relatedness of emotion compared to the lack of relatedness of mood. This compares with 41% of contributors to the psychology literature” (Beedie et al. 2005, 867; see also ib., 864). Another distinguishing feature firms under the heading “cause”; I discuss it in the next section.

  9. If we consider the examples Ratcliffe provides for existential feelings, we may come to think that in addition to existential feelings that provide the background structure of intentionality we find others that are intentionally directed towards many or all encounters we have with the world, e.g., feeling at home, feeling welcome, disrespected, etc. (for further clarification, see Stephan 2012, 158–159 and Jacobs et al. 2014, 94–95).

  10. DeLancey scrutinizes the proposed distinguishing features between moods and emotions such as duration and intentionality, claims to have found instances of emotions that are not distinct from moods in these respects, and concludes that moods and emotions do not differ. This is a misunderstanding of the issue. We are not looking for definitions that include all and only moods; we are looking for features that are typical for moods. A few exceptions, if so at all, do not show that moods are emotions.

  11. For further examples, see Jacobs et al. (2014).

  12. In addition, examinations of the conditio humana in existentialism have pointed towards moods—such as anxiety in Heidegger’s work or nausea in Sartre’s—which may be claimed to deserve the label “existential” in a philosophically even more substantial sense than the moods discussed above. In that context, certain existential moods are not considered to be individual affective responses to a, say, particular miserable life full of traumatic experiences; rather, they are introduced to reveal a general existential condition of humankind, namely the vertigo, horror, anguish or joy we feel while becoming aware that we are free and responsible beings, that “we constitute ourselves through our own choices” (Varga and Guignon 2016, 23).

  13. See, for example, the film Korczak, directed by Andrzej Wajda (1990) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak.

  14. See, for example Griffiths and Scarantino (2009) and Stephan et al. (2014)

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Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Imke von Maur and Matthew Ratcliffe for helpful feedback on an earlier draft. I also thank two anonymous referees for helpful comments. In an enduring mood of gratitude, I thank Aaron Ben-Ze'ev and Angelika Krebs for their patience with me.

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Stephan, A. Moods in Layers. Philosophia 45, 1481–1495 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9841-0

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