Abstract
There are many more philosophical discussions of emotions than of moods. One key reason for this is that emotions are said to have a robust connection to beliefs while moods are said to lack that connection. I argue that this view, though prevalent, is incorrect. It is motivated by examples that are not representative of how moods typically change. Indeed, once we examine the notion of belief-responsiveness and look at a wider range of examples, we can see that moods are belief-responsive and can be evaluated for appropriateness along a number of dimensions. Moreover, for all cases in which moods seem to be disconnected from beliefs, I argue that there are analogous cases for emotions. In other words, the connection between moods and beliefs on the one hand and the connection between emotions and beliefs on the other are, in fact, very similar. This means that not only should we take belief-responsiveness to be a core feature of moods but also potentially pursue a unified theory for why moods and emotions would have this connection to belief.
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Notes
This is not without some precedent. Although they come at the topic from the point of view of psychology and therefore focus on different issues, passages in Parkinson et al. (1996) suggest they take it as a general feature of moods that they respond to changes in belief (p. 7).
Moods in mental health conditions are frequently less stable, more intense, and more motivating than everyday moods. Mental health conditions may also involve moods that differ from everyday moods in their intentionality. For example, clinical anxiety can involve moods that are both more general than a regular anxious mood (as in the case of completely free-floating anxiety) and moods that have a more specific object than a regular anxious mood (as in the case of a social anxiety where anxiety is triggered by very particular types of social circumstances). I want to thank an anonymous referee for this important point.
Many use the terms interchangeably. Others, like Schwarz and Clore (2003), take moods and emotions to be distinct but not different in kind. For Schwarz and Clore, both moods and emotions are feelings but emotions are feelings directed at particular objects and moods are undirected.
For a survey of the literature on the differences between emotions and moods, see Beedie et al. (2005).
Moods may also have a long term analog: stable moods that persist in some form or other over years or decades. Ben-Ze’ev (2017) takes happiness to be this kind of enduring mood.
There has been some discussion about how far this analogy can go. Fish (2005), Roberts (2003), and Chomanski (2018) take the analogy very seriously and put forward perceptualist theories of moods. Gallegos (2017) is more skeptical of the lens metaphor, going instead for a nearby view of moods as “interpretive frames.”
There is a vast psychological literature on the myriad effects that moods have on mental functioning. For a particularly helpful discussion of these effects, see Wong (2016).
This holds for the evening of the day of the event. Interestingly, DeLongis et al. (1988) indicated that even though negative events make people’s mood more negative the day of the event, their mood tends to be higher than average the day after.
Studies like Diener and Diener (1996), and Diener et al. (2015) give us some reason to think that the most common mood, the one most people default to even when they live in some form of hardship, is a mildly positive one. Ben-Ze’ev (2017) argues this is one of the important mechanisms for cultivating enduring happiness. If this is the case, then it might be an interesting question to ask whether most average situations include a mildly positive mood as an appropriate option. Of course, just because we tend to default to this mood doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to do so. On the other hand, I suspect that the appropriateness of a mood has in part to do with what our expectations are: if our expectations are met or exceeded, better moods are appropriate. Almost by definition, an average day is one where our basic expectations are met: nothing dramatically upsets our day in either direction. So, it seems plausible to suppose that having an average day makes being in a mildly positive mood appropriate. If that’s right, we could explain why even the good moods of those people who live in fairly difficult circumstances are appropriate. This is not to say that just any average day would make a positive mood appropriate. An average day of living in the trenches during World War I would probably not make even a mildly positive mood appropriate, no matter the degree to which the day meets one’s expectations.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for this extremely helpful observation.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kevin Craven, Maegan Fairchild, Stephen Finlay, August Gorman, Gabbrielle Johnson, Janet Levin, Lori Meeks, Mark Schroeder, Ralph Wedgwood, and Ben Winokur, as well as the audiences of the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (2018) and the Tokyo Forum for Analytic Philosophy (June 2018) for their very thoughtful comments on various versions of this paper. I am also grateful to Rima Basu, Renée Jorgensen Bolinger, Amber Kavka-Warren, Nicola Kemp, and Kevin Lande for helpful discussion. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous referees at Synthese whose kind and constructive feedback was integral to this paper.
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Kostochka, T.A. Why moods change: their appropriateness and connection to beliefs. Synthese 198, 11399–11420 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02795-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02795-w