Moods and Emotions: What’s The Difference?
When we are trying to deal with the world of emotion, we can often forget or be confused about the differences between moods and emotions. Knowing what are moods and what are emotions, and getting clear on the differences may help us understand ourselves, and understand others better. So what are moods versus emotions?
Image credit: © Kasia Bialasiewicz - bigstockphoto.com
What are moods? Moods stay for a while
In general, the differences are fairly straightforward. Paul Ekman in his accessible book ‘Emotions Revealed’, says that moods are generally emotional feelings. They can last for an extended period of time, say at least one or two days. When we have these moody periods, they often feel like stages that we are going through and they are hard to shift. They often seem like they are brought on by circumstances; pressure at work, pressure at home, money trouble.
Emotions come and go quickly
In contrast, emotions are things that tend to come and go quite quickly. We can think of these emotions as being positive or negative (although the idea of negative emotions is a myth). They're also much more likely to be caused by immediate circumstances; something that someone just said, something that you witnessed or some memories that you had.
Emotions are likely to be sharper than moods, and also more varied; while we can have a great range of exquisitely different emotions, we tend to have moods which are more generalised — a good mood, a bad mood.
Small things we experience can change our emotions quickly, and we can experience more than one emotion at once, and these can reflect different parts of us.
Affects – what we actually feel
The third part of the equation here is Affect. Affect is the physical sensations you have when you have emotions. These are the butterflies in the stomach that we experience with anxiety, the muscular tension that anger can bring, or the ache in the heart we have with grief.
These Affects can be the thing we notice about emotions, and the thing that we can find most distressing about them. I've written more about Affect before.
Moods and emotions
We can experience moods and emotions at the same time, but emotions seem to ‘sit on top’ of moods. For instance, whilst in a bad mood is quite possible to have brief feelings of happiness and joy. Similarly, when a good mood, it is still possible to feel sad or angry feelings. However, it is much more likely that your mood will influence the emotion you feel. So it's not really a question of moods versus emotions; instead it's more moods and emotions.
If this happens, the emotion may have the same flavour as the mood. In this way, our emotions are susceptible to the mood we are in, and this also make us more likely to interpret our environment in particular ways and distort our thinking. When we are in a bad mood, it is much easier to misinterpret things in the light of this bad mood.
Understanding what are moods and emotions – and their differences – takes time and practice. When you do, you can sometimes see that the anger and frustration you are feeling isn’t caused by the people around you but by a mood you have been feeling before you walked in the door and that they shouldn't be blamed. I've written before on what you can do when you're in a bad mood.
Let me know what you think in the comments. If you thought this was interesting, I have a written a similar post called Thinking About The Past.
– Tim Hill
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this is interestingly educative
Thank you, I’m glad you found it useful.
Hi Tim.
I lost my sister 7 months ago. I’ve been in such a bad state since. I finally broke down and saw my G.P. today and he asked me about my mood. This didn’t compute for me at all. I could describe emotions but mood totally eluded me. So I googled it and there you were. I still don’t understand the difference. (I’m a young senior). It boggles my mind I could have lived this long, been in councelling for over a decade at one time, and today was the first time I was ever asked about mood.
If you’re still out there thanks for writing about it.
If you could break it down a bit more I would sure appreciate it.
Rebekah
Hi Rebekah,
I am sorry to hear about your loss – it seems this is still really hurting you, so good on you for going to get some support.
It’s hard to know what your GP meant when he mentioned ‘mood’, as I think many people see mood and emotions as being the same thing. And that’s part of the difficulty of trying to be precise about definitions – the concepts are very similar, and will vary upon who you ask. However, mood generally refers to a longer-term state, such as the one you have been in since the loss of your sister. In contrast, emotions will be the short term reactive things you feel in response to immediate things. For example, if someone cuts you off when you’re driving, you might feel some momentary anger at that; if a young family member gives you a gift, you might experience some joy or gratitude. However, if these happened recently, then your mood is probably still your low feelings of grief and loss even through these experiences. Another analogy; your mood might be ‘winter’ but you can still have a sunny day.
I hope this helps.
Tim
I think personally moods are more easyier to control about me myself only speaking because my emotion lets say how i feel example love has a big change impact both in my life and well caring a self individual person.
Hi Cesar, thank you for your comment. You make an interesting comment about moods, and I can see how they might be able to be changed too – perhaps all it takes is a kind word from someone to ‘lift your mood’ when you are down. However, perhaps it depends on the person too, with some moods in some people just really hard to shift. This is why it gets difficult to give hard and fast rules about these things. But love; such a powerful experience For every one of us!
Regards,
Tim
Moods are harder for me to control than my emotions. I lost a lot of loved ones and friends and even though I might never get over it my emotional feelings are under control. No more crying, weeping, or feelings of sadness emotionally speaking. Yet my moody feelings Id still be crying to the day. There to me isnt to much difference except as i said i can control my emotions easier such as I dont feel like crying today and like that i dont and all, anything that would make me feel like crying I am in control of except for movies with happy endings. Ill have to work on that. Even though they both are feelings. The feeling of emotions sets with me best. Ever heard of a sexy emotion?? Neither have I. Moods are to much trouble to me.