Mood
A relatively diffuse affective state that lasts longer than a brief emotional response and may lack a clear cause.
Affect: The broad domain of feeling states, including emotions, moods, and enduring dispositions. Mood is one kind of affective state, distinguished by its duration and diffuse character.
Emotion: A relatively brief, coordinated response involving feeling, physiology, expression, and action tendencies. Emotions are typically more focused and tied to identifiable events than moods.
Mood disorder: A class of mental disorders marked by persistent disturbances in mood and related functioning. Clinical mood disorders involve sustained or recurring changes beyond ordinary mood variation.
Russell's circumplex model of affect: A model arranging affective states along dimensions of valence and arousal. It provides a compact framework for describing different mood qualities.
Affective neuroscience: The study of neural systems involved in emotion, mood, and other affective processes. It investigates the brain mechanisms underlying sustained affective states.
Valence: The pleasant or unpleasant quality of an experience. Mood often shapes experience along a broad positive-to-negative dimension.
Feeling: The subjective, conscious experience of an affective or bodily state. A feeling is an experience; mood describes a broader, more sustained state.
Major depressive disorder: A disorder involving persistent depressed mood or loss of interest, alongside other symptoms and impairment. It is a specific disorder in which low mood can be a central symptom.
Positive and negative affect schedule: A questionnaire measuring positive and negative affect as relatively distinct dimensions. It operationalizes broad affective states for research on mood.
Predictive processing: A framework proposing that the brain continually generates predictions and updates them using sensory input. It offers one account of how bodily signals and expectations may shape mood.