Why sometimes you feel moody?

Life is a stage play of feelings surrounded by desires. Our desires were first spotted from our feelings. These feelings are the faces of past events of our lives, taste and preferences, impression, rejects and most often times; they are wants. 

Quoting from the subject of this post “ why sometimes you feel moody” my emphasis will be based on a tagged word “Affect”. A switch in our mood is caused by affected thoughts over weakness or most often times rejection and failures. These events of what is affecting can be long lasting if not properly fed with psychological prescriptions and rulings. 

The word “affect” can be defined as the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is an essential part of the study of psychology because it plays such an important role in everyday life. As we will see, affect guides behaviour, helps us make decisions, and has a major impact on our mental and physical health. 

It will interest you to know that the two core social-physics and science of ones mood is “emotions and motivation”.

Emotions and motivation are the centerpiece of anyone success in life, and also anyone downfall in life. Ones ability to deal with emotion and motivation will not only catapult him to excellence, but as well a territory of good health state. 

A popular story of Nelson Mandela is an example of self motivation led by reasons to achieve his goal for human rights, and fight over injustice. Oh well said, some of us could probably back out of what Nelson did if at one point, our motivation faces threats to life. 

Speaking of emotions on the other hand, we can categorically say that there are two path way of emotions. 

1. Positive emotions
2. Negative emotions 

For detail information on why sometimes you feel moody, our emphasis will be on negative emotion. 

What is Negative Emotion?

Negative emotions can come from a triggering event, such as an overwhelming workload. Your thoughts surrounding an event also play a role. The way that you interpret what happened can alter how you experience the event and whether or not it causes stress.

Our ability to feel and respond to our emotions is often taken for granted. Do you know that Psychologists have long explored the range of human emotions and their definitions. Eckman (1999) identified six initial basic emotions:

• Anger
• Fear
• Disgust
• Sadness
• Happiness
• Surprise

Extras also includes the underlying list of actions created from emotions. Please note that emotions are actually low levels of the human mood. As a matter of fact, feelings is mostly proceeded from emotions and that is why we have chosen to address the subject of this post on emotions, rather than assuming that feelings only causes swing in mood. Please consider the list below while pondering on these act on our physical actions. 

• Excitement
• Amusement
• Contentment
• Embarrassment
• Contempt
• Guilt
• Pride
• Relief
• Satisfaction
• Sensory Pleasure
• Shame

From our list, at least you can say that indeed, emotion are completely normal. Each emotional state is normal and result proceed with normal feelings. Normal feelings can be bad mood or good mood. It only means that at that point of time, a trigger was sent and at that time it was sent, we naturally reacted to it based on its state. If all said doesn’t satisfy the answers you seek, you may want to read further. 

A Look at the Psychology of Emotions

One of the more popular psychological theories of emotions is Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. Plutchik (1980) stated that there are eight basic emotions: joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, anticipation, anger and disgust. Plutchik went further by pairing the emotions with their opposites and then creating the wheel of emotions, which serves to elaborate on how complex and interactive our emotions are.

Plutchik paired the basic emotions with their polar opposites to further develop his theory, so:

• Sadness is the opposite of Joy
• Anticipation is the opposite of Surprise
• Anger is the opposite of Fear
• Disgust is the opposite of Trust

So many scholars noted Plutchik’s wheel a strong visual representation of how our emotions present themselves. As you can see the core emotion decreases as you move outward on the wheel. Plutchik also used color to represent the intensity of the emotion: the darker the color, the more intense it is. So at its most intense trust becomes admiration, and at its least intense, acceptance. 

It’s a fantastic starting resource for helping us further develop our understanding of how our emotions present themselves, how they fluctuate and how they can interact with each other. 

It has informed further psychological research in this area and is often the foundation from which researchers exploring emotions have based their research (Eckman, 1999, Parrott, 2001, Lazarus & Lazarus, 1996).

Shaver et al (1987) and later Parrott (2001) proposed a ‘tree’ of emotions which broke emotions into primary, secondary and tertiary dimensions. This includes 6 primary emotions (love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness, and fear), with associated emotions that develop at the secondary level, and again at the tertiary level.

For example, if the primary emotion is joy, the secondary emotions could include cheerfulness, optimism or enthrallment and the tertiary level could include pleasure, triumph or hope.

Cambria, Livingstone, and Hussain (2011) took Plutchik’s wheel to another level and developed ‘The Hourglass of Emotions’. In their book, they built on Plutchik’s eight basic emotions and broke them down into four dimensions: sensitivity, attention, pleasantness, and aptitude.

They also made distinctions between which of the emotions were positive (joy, trust, anger, and anticipation) or negative (disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise).