#Examples of negative moods full#

Strongly pleasant mood: Happiness, contentment, and joy are examples of strongly pleasant moods.People who are relaxed are not highly motivated to do anything, but they are feeling good. Mildly pleasant mood: A sense of relaxation is probably the best example here.In this context, your feelings more powerfully influence your thoughts, and it can be very difficult to feel positively about your experience of the world. Strongly unpleasant mood: This includes states of anxiety and depression.You can think of boredom as the unpleasant absence of engaging activities, and irritation as a mood where your environment is repeatedly, but mildly, unpleasant to you.

Mildly unpleasant mood: This includes states of boredom or irritation.From this understanding, we can identify four examples of moods: Another way to think of this is how focused on reward versus threat we are (Nettle & Bateson, 2012). This is why I generally encourage couples to take a “timeout” on hard conversations when the mood isn’t right and return to the topic later.Īs I noted above, moods can be characterized by two dimensions: how pleasant or unpleasant they are, and how intense they are. However, their mood will make it difficult to listen well, paraphrase back, and empathize with their partner. Often, couples try to have difficult conversations when they are in a negative mood – after all, that’s when their complaints about the relationship are top of mind. Sometimes a client comes to therapy too worked up from their day to handle a conversation about tough topics – they might have too hard of a time getting stuck in negative thought patterns, and I don’t want them to leave the session in that stuck place. You could call this emotional thinking – a phenomenon where our feelings shape the very possibilities of our thoughts.Īs a therapist, I get to see this play out frequently. Psychologists think moods are important to study, not just because they’re a very important part of the lived human experience, but also because they impact how we perceive and respond to the world (Nettle & Bateson, 2012).

#Examples of negative moods full#

If you’ve ever had a morning like this, your response was actually adaptive: you reacted to an environment full of unexpected threats by putting your system on high alert so that you would be better able to respond to the next threat. For example, a morning of inconveniences – a traffic accident snarling traffic, a long wait at the doctor’s office, and then a bumped-up deadline at work – could put you in a state of anxiety. Scientists think that moods are created by the experiences we have, especially experiences happening close together in time (Nettle & Bateson, 2012). Sometimes moods seem linked to particular objects or experiences in your environment, and at other times, they just are (Siemer, 2005). Once you’re in a particular mood, it will likely continue for some time, even though it may not seem related to anything in your current environment (Russell, 2003). One of the things that distinguishes moods from emotions (more on that below) is that moods are longer-lasting one of the most frustrating things about moods is that just becoming aware of ours isn’t enough to help us change them. You probably can often sense when you’re in a good mood or a bad mood.

We are usually aware to some degree of the nature of our mood, even if we can’t change or control it (Watson & Clark, 1997). By contrast, when you are in an angry mood, things probably feel intensely unpleasant. When you say you’re in a relaxed mood, for example, you are probably feeling positive, but in a mild way. In this regard, they are much like emotions. Moods have two chief characteristics: whether they are positive (pleasant) or negative (unpleasant), and how intense they are (Watson & Clark, 1997). So rather than thinking, “That’s so thoughtful of them,” when my friends invite me over for dinner during an especially busy week, I might instead think, “Oh no, now I have to deal with letting them down, or getting behind on work because I said yes to them.” For example, when I am in a negative mood, I might feel worried or upset, and my thoughts will generally follow this pattern, too. Scientists define a mood as a prolonged period of time in which you tend to feel certain feelings and have thoughts that mirror those feelings (Watson & Clark, 1997).