Mood (psychology)

“ Only the adult and complex forms of the affective life were considered, without regard to their evolution, which alone brings us to their origin. The parts played by movements as psychological factors, and by unconscious activity, were forgotten or misunderstood. Pleasures and pains in their manifold forms were regarded as the essential phenomena in place of the hidden springs which give rise to them.
To sum up, the psychology of the emotions has its point of departure in those complex feelings which daily life brings beneath our eyes every moment. ”

“ An important characteristic of feelings consists lastly in the fact that they combine themselves into an affective process, which as a rule is joined to an ideational process. A temporal process of this kind with an affective and ideational content, that changes but is nevertheless joined together, we call an emotion, or with less intensity and a more lasting nature of the feelings, a disposition. Joy, delight, merriness, hope are emotions in which the predominant feeling is pleasure; anger, grief, sorrow, and fear are emotions in which displeasure predominates. ”

“ Besides this, let us observe ourselves and interrogate our own consciousness. “Let us consider ourselves at one of those moments of calm and apparent indifference, when it seems as if nothing could move us, and our numbed sensibility remains, as it were, suspended between pleasure and pain. This deceptive appearance of insensibility and aridity always masks some more or less feeble sensations of ease or uneasiness, some more or less slight and confused sentiments of joy or grief which are none the less real for being in nowise vivid or exciting. ”

“ Not only is mood dependent on our sensations and thoughts for its quality, but it in turn colors our entire mental life. It serves as a background or setting whose hue is reflected over all our thinking. Let the mood be somber and dark, and all the world looks gloomy; on the other hand, let the mood be bright and cheerful, and the world puts on a smile. ”

“ We may now follow the evolution of the life of feeling in its chief stages, which are—pre-conscious sensibility, the appearance of the primitive emotions, their transformation either into complex and abstract emotions or into that stable and chronic state which constitutes the passions. ”

“ Important as is the influence of pleasures and pains upon our movements, they are far from being our only stimuli. With the manifestations of instinct and emotional expression, for example, they have absolutely nothing to do. Who smiles for the pleasure of the smiling, or frowns for the pleasure of the frown? Who blushes to escape the discomfort of not blushing? Or who in anger, grief, or fear is actuated to the movements which he makes by the pleasures which they yield? ”

“ The intermediate links between this outwardly stimulated physical feeling and so-called purely mental emotion are represented by localized organic feelings, passing by imperceptible degrees into non-localized feeling experienced as mood. But feeling on any plane is not, as conscious, uncombined with thought. ”

“ I think we have thus replied to the question previously put—why certain sensations, images, ideas, have the privilege of producing organic and motor changes which, translated into the language of consciousness, constitute the emotional state—and justified our answer. The sensation, the image, the idea, are only occasional causes, incapable by themselves of producing any emotion: it springs from the inmost personality of the individual—from his organisation—expresses it directly, and participates in its stability and its instability. ”

“ The difference of the sensibility is shown best by the difference of our emotion about the things from one age to another, or when we are in different organic moods. What was bright and exciting becomes weary, flat, and unprofitable. The bird's song is tedious, the breeze is mournful, the sky is sad.
To these indirect presumptions that our sensations, following the mutations of our capacity for feeling, are always undergoing an essential change, must be added another presumption, based on what must happen in the brain. Every sensation corresponds to some cerebral action. ”

“ Thus every one, according to the range of his intelligence, may reach some or all these stages, and according to his temperament experience or not experience at each of them an emotional state. The emotions which are susceptible of a complete evolution will furnish the proofs. ”

“ But this record of symptoms, though minute, was vague compared to my reckless analysis of my emotions. With a lack of reserve characteristic of my mood, I described the joy of living, which, for the most part, then consisted in the joy of writing. And even now, when I reread my record, I feel that I cannot overstate the pleasure I found in surrendering myself completely to that controlling impulse. ”

“ Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common-sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a [Pg 450] bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. ”

“ So for the affective states the terms emotion, passion, sensibility, etc., are nothing but abstractions, and in order to verify these terms and give them a real significance, we must have experiences in the region of feeling, concrete data. People who speak of a state of feeling which they have never experienced, which they know only by hearsay, have an empty concept. States of feeling are a material susceptible of all degrees of abstraction, like sensory material. ”

“ If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction; and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom, distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its specific feeling-tone. ”

“ Our remoter spiritual, material, and social selves, so far as they are realized, come also with a glow and a warmth; for the thought of them infallibly brings some degree of organic emotion in the shape of quickened heart-beats, oppressed breathing, or some other alteration, even though it be a slight one, in the general bodily tone. ”

“ In the same way we have every conceivable mode of progression and combination supplied by the nature of the mood, the actual condition of the individual soul-life, the degree of passion, its excitement or rapid transition of conflicting emotion, or the tranquillity of the heart or the mind in some long-drawn process of contemplation. As a rule, in respect to all such subject-matter, we are able to determine very little that is fixed, owing to the repeated changes in the ever varied facets of the soul. ”

“ From the perception to the image, and from the image to the concept, the concomitant emotional element keeps on diminishing, other things being equal; for we must take into account differences of temperament and individual variations. ”

“ From our standpoint, emotion is in the order of feeling the equivalent of perception in the intellectual order, a complex synthetic state essentially made up of produced or arrested movements, of organic modifications (in circulation, respiration, etc.) , of an agreeable or painful or mixed state of consciousness peculiar to each emotion. It is a phenomenon of sudden appearance and limited duration; it is always related to the preservation of the individual or the species—directly as regards primitive emotions, indirectly as regards derived emotions. ”

“ Don't you know, it happens once in a while that you have a mood, and that your surroundings come up to it? It doesn't happen very often, either—at least, to workaday people like us. So I stood there, looking and listening and breathing. ”

“ I have found moods to be very poor tests of character. Having cut through the crust of a most forbidding mood, produced by bodily derangement or constant and pressing labor of the brain, I have often found a heart full of all the sweetest and richest traits of humanity. ”

“ Even when no change of outward attitude is produced, their inward tension alters to suit each varying mood, and is felt as a difference of tone or of strain. In depression the flexors tend to prevail; in elation or belligerent excitement the extensors take the lead. And the various permutations and combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible, make it abstractly possible that no shade of emotion, however slight, should be without a bodily reverberation as unique, when taken in its totality, as is the mental mood itself. ”

“ As the psychic life, considered from the most general point of view, can be reduced to two fundamental manifestations: feeling and acting, we have in the first place, broadly speaking, distinguished two types: the sensitive and the active.
1. The sensitive, who might also be called the affective or emotional, have as their special characteristic the exclusive predominance of sensibility. Impressionable to excess, they are like instruments in a perpetual state of vibration, and their life is for the most part inward. The physiological bases of this type of character are not easy to enumerate ”

“ Moreover, how could our sensibility fail to be, constantly, more or less impressed by so many general causes which, independent of particular causes, so constantly act upon us, at every instant of our life, and which, so to speak, ceaselessly besiege us, from within and from without? ”

“ We don't think enough about moods. We are all subject to moods, and yet we judge a new acquaintance by the mood he happens to be in—and the mood we happen to be in—at the time of making the acquaintanceship. ”

“ Shall what bore late the dust-mood, think and brood Till it bring forth the great believing mood? Or that which bore the grand mood, bald and peeled, Sit down to croon the shabby sensual song, To hug itself, and sink from wrong to meaner wrong? 4. In the low mood, the mere man acts alone, Moved by impulses which, if from within, Yet far outside the centre man begin; But in the grand mood, every softest tone Comes from the living God at very heart— From thee who infinite core of being art, Thee who didst call our names ere ever we could sin. ”

“ The distinction between wise use and misuse lies in whether disintegrating or creative thoughts, with their correspondingly energizing or depressing [Pg 41] emotions or feelings, are allowed to hold sway in consciousness.
Energizing Emotions
When we speak of energizing emotions or feelings we mean love, courage, brightness, earnestness, cheer, enthusiasm. When we speak of depressing emotions or feelings we mean doubt, fear, worry, gloom.
No elements are more essential to a successful business or a successful life than the right kind of emotional elements. ”

“ The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time. In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. ”

“ Apart from pleasure and pain, however, the law seems but a corollary of the fact that the more concentrated a state of consciousness is, the more vivid it is. When feeling a color, or listening to a tone per se, we get it more intensely, notice it better, than when we are aware of it merely as one among many other properties of a total object. ”

“ All these feelings may relate to the mere solution of the problem as end, or may pass beyond it to ends more or less distant and complicated, to which the solution of the problem then appears as means. Even if we could suppose all other feeling to be excluded, we cannot conceive of a train of thought untinged with mood,—interest or weariness, exhilaration or depression,—the dim complex of perhaps many elements, but admitting of general classification on the side of either the pleasurable or the painful, the agreeable or the disagreeable. ”

“ A pleasure, a pain, an emotion, are always associated with a sensation, a representation, or an act; revival necessarily bringing back the intellectual state which forms part of the complexus and supports it. ”

“ There is pain in fear, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling; there is pleasure in sexual emotion, in certain moments of anger and of the self-feeling. These two states have no domain of their own. Emotion, by its nature, particularises; pleasure and pain by their nature universalise; they are the general marks of the affective life, and if they coincide like the emotions with motor, vaso-motor, and other phenomena, that is because no form of feeling can exist without its physiological conditions. ”

“ Except in some rare cases, which will be pointed out later on, it scarcely ever rises beyond a medium tone, especially in its higher manifestations.
After having traced it to its origin, we shall have to follow its evolution, which passes through three principal phases: the first, utilitarian and practical; the second, disinterested and scientific; in the third, which is much less frequent, it attains the power and exclusiveness of a passion.
I. This feeling, like all the others, depends on an instinct, a tendency, a craving; it expresses in consciousness its satisfaction or non-satisfaction. ”