Affect and Mood

1. Affect and Mood

2. Definition • The external and dynamic manifestations of a person's internal emotional state • A person's affect is the expression of emotion or feelings displayed to others through facial expressions, hand gestures, voice tone, and other emotional signs such as laughter or tears. • Affect fluctuates according to emotional state. • A facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect APA, 2006

3. Description • Affect can mean a instinctual reaction to stimulation occurring before the typical cognitive processes considered necessary for the formation of a more complex emotion. • Many theorist suggest that affect is a post-cognitive process. • affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions

4. Pre or Post Cognitive • Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding and can be made sooner and with greater confidence than cognitive judgments • Affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive: initial emotional responses produce thoughts, which produce affect

5. Influential Factors • A narrow reinforcement model of emotion allows other perspectives about how affect influences emotional development. • Temperament, cognitive development,socialization patterns, and the idiosyncrasies of one's family or subculture might interact in non-linear ways. For example, the temperament of a highly reactive/low self-soothing infant may "disproportionately" affect the process of emotion regulation in the early months of life

6. three main categories • Valence • Arousal • Motivational intensity

7. Valence • Valence is the positive-to-negative evaluation of the subjectively experienced state. • Emotional valence is defined as referring to the emotion’s consequences, eliciting circumstances, or subjective feel or attitude

8. Arousal • Arousal is by the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and can be measured subjectively. • Arousal is a construct that is closely related to motivational intensity but they differ because motivation requires action implications while arousal does not

9. Motivational intensity • Refers to impulsion to act. • It is the strength of urge to move toward or away from a stimulus. • Simply moving is not considered approach motivation without a motivational urge present

10. Three Dimensions • All three of these categories are important when looking at the effect of affective states on cognitive scope. • Initially, it was thought that positive affects broadened cognitive scope whereas negative affects narrowed cognitive scope

11. Clinical Practice • Affect is described by labelling the apparent emotion conveyed by the person's nonverbal behavior (anxious, sad etc.), and also by using the parameters of appropriateness, intensity, range, reactivity and mobility. • Affect may be described as appropriate or inappropriate to the current situation, and as congruent or incongruent with their thought content. • The intensity of the affect may be described as normal, blunted affect, exaggerated, flat, heightened or overly dramatic. A flat or blunted affect is associated with schizophrenia, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder; heightened affect might suggest mania, and an overly dramatic or exaggerated affect might suggest certain personality disorders.

12. Clinical Practice • Mobility refers to the extent to which affect changes during the interview: the affect may be described as mobile, constricted, fixed, immobile or labile. • The person may show a full range of affect, in other words a wide range of emotional expression during the assessment, or may be described as having restricted affect. • The affect may also be described as reactive, in other words changing flexibly and appropriately with the flow of conversation, or as unreactive.

13. Social Interaction • Affect, emotion, or feeling is displayed to others through facial expressions, hand gestures, posture, voice characteristics, and other physical manifestation. • Affect displays vary between and within cultures • These emotional and affective communication provide channels for social interactions

14. Mood

15. Definition • Emotional state with an intense and constant background • Moods are basic psychological states that can occur as a reaction to an event or can surface for no apparent external cause. • Mood can affect an individual’s judgment and perception of objects and events • Mood can manipulate how individuals interpret and translate the world around them, and can also direct their behavior

16. Mood-Affect: Difference • Mood, like emotion, is an affective state. However, an emotion tends to have a clear focus, while mood tends to be more unfocused and diffused

17. Clinical Practice Types of mood: • Neutral • Euthymic • Dysphoric • Euphoric • Angry • Anxious • Apathetic

18. Altered States • Alexithymic individuals may be unable to describe their subjective mood state. • An individual who is unable to experience any pleasure may be suffering from anhedonia.