I noticed that in you comments, you do not talk about emotions, but about angry feelings and angry mood, so it’s not clear to me if you distinguish or conflate “angry emotion“, “angry feelings“ and “angry mood“. — neomac

Let me try to clarify the larger framework that is informing my categorical divisions.

The way I understand it, affect is a complex aspect of human functioning that can be divided for the sake of discussion ( but not in its actual functioning) into a cognitive and a bodily component.
As a general category of bodily processes, affect includes expressive features like physical gestures and impulses. In anger we experience an impulse to destroy or attack. Our bodies express anger with clenched fists, and with facial expressions such as gritted teeth, furrowed brows and loud vocalizations. In fear the body impels us to flee, our heart rate increases, our eyes dilate, the body shakes. Besides the expressive and motoric components of bodily affect, there are sensory aspects. I want to start with these.

Our motivational system is structured such that aversive and reinforcing sensations from the body have become built into the very fabric of thought and language. Rational, conceptual thought gets its meaning and direction from its connections with bodily felt sensations which allow us to care about what we think about.
When you read the word anger or the word fear , you are experiencing subtle body sensations which are embedded in your comprehension of the words and allow you to understand what they mean. This doesnt mean that whenever you read the word anger your fist clenches and your teeth grit, but there are incipient impulses in this direction in the background of your awareness that are activated by your comprehending the word.
More importantly, aversive and reinforcing sensations are operative in every aspect of our relationships with others, and they guide our dealings such as to motivate us to feel and thereby to act in certain ways when we are disappointed or frustrated, when we fail to predict outcomes, when something harmful to our well being is at hand.

I mentioned the expressive and gestural complements of such entities and anger and fear. These come into play to aid us in responding to situations that we already assess as detrimental, thanks to the aversive bodily sensations that are embedded into our cognitive assessment. But when do they come into play? I see the classic stereotypical behaviors we associate with anger or fear as one extreme end of a spectrum of behavior that begins at the other end with the most subtle and nuanced felt assessment of a situation as irritating in the case of anger, or slightly disturbing in the case of fear. Of course , we don’t generally use the words anger or fear until we reach that point of classic full throttled ‘emotionality’ , but I suggest that such behavior belongs to the same spectrum as annoyance, irritation, disapproval, in which the classic facial expressions and body gestures and impulses of anger are lacking. Why are they lacking? Is it because anger is a pre-wired mechanism that is simply switched on or off? Or is it that we don’t need the full-blown expressive aspects of what we call anger until a situation becomes intolerable?

So we can call one end of the anger spectrum cognitive assessment informed by sensory feeling, and the opposite end the full blown emotion of anger. But what about mood, passion and disposition ? Let’s look at your example of the employer’s ‘bad mood’.
How do they know he is in a bad mood? Well, he could have put his fist through the wall or through an employee’s face. Or he could have shouted. Or maybe he had a scowl on his face. He might have evinced none of these overt behaviors and instead talked in a calm and unemotional manner , but the content of what he said could have involved the conveyance of hostility toward an employee. But what if his employees knew him well enough to know that he was prone to sudden and brief flare-ups of temper that subsides quickly as they began? In that case, angry behaviors by themselves would not be enough for the employees to conclude that he was ina bad mood. So what differentiates the angry mood from isolated bouts of anger? You suggest disposition , but what makes someone disposed to act angrily in more than just a one-off fashion? This is where frame of mind comes into play. If the basis of classic anger is to be found d at the other end of the spectrum , in subtly felt cognitive assessments of irritation and aggravation, what turns such assessments into prolonged episodes that cause us to say that someone is in a mood? Let’s look at the kind of cogntive assessment that precedes a temper tantrum. Let’s say at the beginning of the work day the boss found out his favorite employee was stealing from him. A a result, the boss felt let down, hurt , violated, betrayed. It affected the way he looked at himself as boss. He felt his authority was threatened. After all , if he couldn’t trust his best worker , who could
he trust? As he attempted to get his work done , these feelings of threat, betrayal , breakdown of trust extended their tentacles into every aspect of his job, preventing him from concentrating. Every task he tried to focus on, every person he saw reminded him of this crisis in his personal situation. One could say that throughout the day he was disposed toward overt displays of anger. But notice how intricately connected the flare-ups are to the larger context of distressed thinking he was experiencing all day. As I said earlier, the boss’s classic ‘emotion’ of anger is made possible , framed by and belongs to the larger context of irritated thinking, which at various times becomes amplified into a thinking of absolutely intolerable violation that requires all the accoutrements of rage behavior. So I say a bad mood is characterized by a more or less continuous stream of cognitive assessments guided by aversive bodily sensations (feelings of threat, violation, disrespect, betrayal) and that at various points the cognitive assessment can conclude that the situation is intolerable and justifies a flare-up. This assessment ‘triggers’( I prefer to say , is backed up by) the classic anger behavior.

In conclusion , I would say that feeling-guided cognitive assessment is an actual state of ‘pre-emotional’ feeling , but on the same spectrum as full blown emotion. The whole spectrum of feeling intensity is involved in a mood, from subtle irritation to lunatic rage, and so actual states of feeling of various levels of intensity and behavioral expressiveness( overt emotionality) are involved throughout the duration of the mood. The most important pint is that the angry blowup is not simply reflexive behaviors. Its core is behaviors which serve a purpose , and that purpose is to aid the achievement of the cognitive goals of punishment and exacting revenge for a perceived violation and betrayal. These cognitive assessments are an integral part of the angry emotion. Take the assessment away and you dont have an emotion, merely reflexive action.

@Joshs, very elaborate and interesting analysis. I’m afraid I’m not as skillful as you to articulate my views.
Anyhow, did your analysis prove that moods are not dispositions? I doubt that. You wrote: “So what differentiates the angry mood from isolated bouts of anger? You suggest disposition , but what makes someone disposed to act angrily in more than just a one-off fashion?”. This question shows me that you admit the existence of emotional dispositions, but in order to account for moods you find it decisive to look at actual emotions (or milder/subtle actual feelings) and deeper motivations.
I think your approach is misleading on two grounds:
1. We always detect dispositions by observing some occurring behavior, indeed a behavioral pattern, yet we do not need to have personally observed those behavioral patterns that support disposition claims, someone else can have done that for us. In any case the purpose of talking about dispositions is to guide our expectations in possible future behaviors (what would happen if…), so much so that this can become a strong reason for having terms to identify those dispositions (e.g. “soluble” for salt). And this is precisely the role I think we give to “mood”-related vocabulary at least for certain emotional dispositions. If I know that someone is simply angry, I can hope to smooth down their anger by making some inoffensive and distracting playful remark, while if I know that someone is in a bad mood, I would more likely avoid such an attempt to not risk to make that person even more angry than she actually is.
2. When we talk about moods indeed we do not need to know the deeper roots of a given person's mood: maybe she is in a good mood because she won the lottery, or because she just came back from a successful yoga session, or because she smoked marijuana, or because her beloved one is coming back home after months of separation, or by character like Pollyanna. Mood-claims are allowed whenever there are emotional patterns that can guide our expectations about possible future emotional reactions under certain conditions, independently from their genesis.

the purpose of talking about dispositions is to guide our expectations in possible future behaviors (what would happen if…), — neomac

I agree that optimizing our ability to anticipate the future behaviors of others should be the central goal of any psychological model.
The better we understand the way the other person is experiencing their world right now , the better we can anticipate what they are likely to do next. The deeper roots or genesis of a person’s moods as I described them in my previous post are not some patterns of thinking that only happened in the distant past and aren’t relevant now. They are still happening right now; they form the background context of a person’s current thinking and feeling.

When we talk about moods indeed we do not need to know the deeper roots of a given person's mood: maybe she is in a good mood because she won the lottery, or because she just came back from a successful yoga session, or because she smoked marijuana, or because her beloved one is coming back home after months of separation, or by character like Pollyanna. — neomac

We don’t have to become psychoanalysts and plumb other’s childhood experiences in order to anticipate their actions. But the more we know about their history, that is , our history with them, the better we can interpret what they are doing now and why they are doing it.

If I am good friends with the boss and have known him a long time , I don’t need to witness him having a temper tantrum in order to detect that he is in a bad mood. I may be able to recognize in even the most subtle behaviors of his that he is brooding about something, behaviors that others who do not share a history with him will be completely oblivious to. Maybe he nervously taps his finger on the desk when he is agitated, or sighs a lot , or becomes uncharacteristically quiet. I may also know that he is prone to fire people without warning when he is in such a mood, and newbies at the office will have no way of protecting themselves, since they may only be looking for overt emotional manifestations of anger. They will completely miss , or misread the signs.

If I know that someone is simply angry, I can hope to smooth down their anger by making some inoffensive and distracting playful remark, while if I know that someone is in a bad mood, I would more likely avoid such an attempt to not risk to make that person even more angry than she actually is. — neomac

What they dont know but you know, thanks to your familiarity with his personality , is that he never shows any overt emotionality when he is in his bad moods. What you also know , but they don’t , is how to make him feel better. What commonly works for most people who are feeling angry or down doesn't for him.

Knowing the reason for the mood ( winning lottery, smoking marijuana, yoga session) is useful here to the extent that we know enough about the person to fathom how the event is likely to affect them. If the boss’s dog dies the day before, and we see him agitated today , it is helpful to now whether he was profoundly attached to his pet or whether instead he didn’t care much for the dog.
If we know he will be absolutely devastated by the loss, it will make a great deal of difference in terms of our anticipation of his future behavior both inside and outside the office. Especially since, as someone who doesn’t show emotion, we would have few behavior clues about how he is feeling.

We always detect dispositions by observing some occurring behavior, indeed a behavioral pattern, yet we do not need to have personally observed those behavioral patterns that support disposition claims, someone else can have done that for us. — neomac

What if that someone doesn’t know the boss as well as you do?

I guess there are a couple of lessons here. First , that human beings are not stimulus response machines who react to events in easily generalizable ways. They react in ways that are unique to them. Second, people understands their world via stable ongoing schemes and habits. These habits can be understood as templates that they place over events to make sense of them and predict future happenings. The more effectively we understand the stable templates, habits and schemes others employ to navigate life, the better position we are to both identify their moods and to help alleviate their suffering. We could not talk about moods if there weren’t these stable themes and patterns of thinking that guide peoples’ behaviors. There would be no emotions either. We don’t get emotional over events that are of trival significance to us. They must impact us at a more superordinate level of relevance to our lives and the way we think about ourselves. In other words, emotions reveal to us the hierarchical nature of our motivations. Our day to day trivialities are guided by more superordinate goals and concerns , and it is these thematic concerns that give us moods , and when they are in crisis , they give us emotions.

Mood-claims are allowed whenever there are emotional patterns that can guide our expectations about possible future emotional reactions under certain conditions, independently from their genesis. — neomac

Your approach sounds somewhat behavioristic to me. I think you would agree that in order to make use of someone’s dispositions for the purpose of anticipating their future behavior, we have to know where to look and how to interpret what we find.


We need to consult more than just overt behavior patterns in order to understand and predict others behavior. These outward signs must be linked back to our prior history with that person to the extent that we can
do so, and that includes knowing about recent significant events in their lives,
In order to recognize anothers moods, and how they are likely to behave when in a particular mood, we must attempt to connect outward signs and gestures with underlying themes of concern that preoccupy them. We can’t know exactly what they are thinking obviously, but we can recognize that these concerns are not just random unrelated thoughts that flit across a person’s mind and then disappear. Instead , from one moment to the next , what matters to us forms an interlinked, integrated network of goals and interests that are tied together via narratives. Mood reveals this thematic continuity. There could be no moods without the stable ongoing continuity of the larger themes of concern. If one cannot see this linkage of internal scheme and outward signs , then one has to settle for the relative superficiality of behaviorist methods of observation. They do tell us something about others , but leave out much that is vital to achieving intimate anticipatory understanding of others.

@Joshs
My strong impression is that we are addressing different philosophical issues. You seem mainly concerned about what is required to have a better understanding of human behaviour [1], and in order to achieve that you are advocating for a more holistic than behaviouristic approach [2]. This concern is clearly epistemological not ontological. My issue is instead primarily ontological: in other words, I’m discussing about what emotions or moods are. More specifically if we can understand moods as emotional dispositions. Or how we can ontologically discriminate between moods and passions, especially if we consider both emotional dispositions. And these considerations give me clues on how to deal with the epistemological concerns too: e.g. I think that the ontological analysis of moods support the idea that we can identify them successfully without any reference to background motivations or causes.
Of course your epistemological concerns too must be grounded in some ontological understanding of the subject yet your ontological/epistemological stance remains ambiguous to me. My suspect is that is because you are conflating ontological with epistemological concerns. Indeed on one side you keep admitting emotional dispositions and how important is to detect them, besides you also keep using mood-terms for discriminating actual from dispositional behavior [3]. On the other side not only you do not seem willing to acknowledge the role that mood-terms may play in discriminating actual from dispositional behavior (see your previous comment), but you seem also to suggest that emotions too can support expectations, since they can reveal motivations [4], if so then do we really need to distinguish emotions from emotional dispositions after all?

So let me ask you again:
- Do you agree that mood-terms are particularly suitable to suggest emotional dispositions (as e.g. soluble is particularly suitable to suggest the disposition of salt to dissolve in water)?
- Do you agree that in order to detect successfully someone’s mood we do not necessarily need to know background motivations or causes that would explain that mood (as e.g. to detect that salt is soluble doesn’t require any scientific knowledge of the chemistry of salt)?



[1]
The better we understand the way the other person is experiencing their world right now , the better we can anticipate what they are likely to do next.

the more we know about their history, that is , our history with them, the better we can interpret what they are doing now and why they are doing it.

What if that someone doesn’t know the boss as well as you do?

The more effectively we understand the stable templates, habits and schemes others employ to navigate life, the better position we are to both identify their moods and to help alleviate their suffering.

We need to consult more than just overt behavior patterns in order to understand and predict others behavior. These outward signs must be linked back to our prior history with that person to the extent that we can do so, and that includes knowing about recent significant events in their lives.

Knowing the reason for the mood ( winning lottery, smoking marijuana, yoga session) is useful here to the extent that we know enough about the person to fathom how the event is likely to affect them.

[2]
First , that human beings are not stimulus response machines who react to events in easily generalizable ways. They react in ways that are unique to them.

If one cannot see this linkage of internal scheme and outward signs , then one has to settle for the relative superficiality of behaviorist methods of observation. They do tell us something about others , but leave out much that is vital to achieving intimate anticipatory understanding of others

[3]
I may also know that he is prone to fire people without warning when he is in such a mood, and newbies at the office will have no way of protecting themselves, since they may only be looking for overt emotional manifestations of anger.

In order to recognize anothers moods, and how they are likely to behave when in a particular mood, we must attempt to connect outward signs and gestures with underlying themes of concern that preoccupy them.

[4]
emotions reveal to us the hierarchical nature of our motivations.

You seem mainly concerned about what is required to have a better understanding of human behaviour [1], and in order to achieve that you are advocating for a more holistic than behaviouristic approach [2]. This concern is clearly epistemological not ontological. My issue is instead primarily ontological: in other words, I’m discussing about what emotions or moods are. — neomac

My concern is just as ontological as yours. I am also discussing what emotions and moods are.
The ‘ontological’ angle, as you put it, what something is, depends on which approach to psychology we are using. A behavioral definition of such things as moods and emotions will be different than a cognitivist or neurophysiological or embodied enactivist one. I’m trying to find out which approach to psychology you are getting your definitions from.

you are conflating ontological with epistemological concerns — neomac

I’m not sure what’s this means. Do you know?

- Do you agree that mood-terms are particularly suitable to suggest emotional dispositions (as e.g. soluble is particularly suitable to suggest the disposition of salt to dissolve in water)?

You mean if I say someone is in a bad mood this means they might get angry? Yes, and if they are in a good mood they might also get angry. Soluble means salt will definitely dissolve in water. Bad mood doesn’t mean a person will definitely get angry. It means they may get angry. And they may get angry if they are ina good mood. If calling mood an emotional disposition just means that in a given mood the chances of having a certain emotion are more probable than when not in that mood, then I agree. But this doesn’t seem very interesting to me if that’s all you’re trying to say.


Do you agree that in order to detect successfully someone’s mood we do not necessarily need to know background motivations or causes that would explain that mood (as e.g. to detect that salt is soluble doesn’t require any scientific knowledge of the chemistry of salt)? — neomac

If we don’t have some basic knowledge of chemistry, then soluble will mean something quite rudimentary , and our predictions of the behavior of the salt in the water will be very limited. Similarly, detecting a mood requires knowing what a mood consists of , and that requires knowing a bit about the structure of someone’s thinking, and as I already said , motivation is at the very center of the structure of someone’s thinking. We don’t need to know any background motivation if we want to do a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood. We will end up treating ‘predisposition to emotion’ the way a person ignorant of chemistry treats solubility; in a very limited fashion with poor predictiveness.


And what we are detecting with the salt isn’t a disposition, it’s an actual occurrence. The salt is dissolving before our eyes. So then we say that under a certain circumstance the salt will dissolve. If we work backward in the same way from an actual occurrence of emotion, we can look around at the circumstance surrounding the emotion. We may notice that the person said they were in a bad mood before they had the emotion. We could then surmise a correlation between their saying they were in a bad mood and the emotion that appeared.

What would help me at this point is to know if there are any particular writings-theories in psychology that have inspired your ontological descriptions of passion, mood, emotion and disposition. If so, could you direct me to some authors or writings? I would help me understand better what you are getting at and why it seems important to you.

@Joshs,

By “you are conflating ontological with epistemological concerns”, I simply meant that some of your comments sounded as objections to my views on the ontology of emotions and moods but the main arguments you provided were all about the epistemology of emotions and moods (how to better understand human behavior). To say that moods are emotional dispositional states and emotions are actual states is compatible with both behavioristic and holistic approaches to understanding the emotional life of human beings. So I didn’t understand why you were repeatedly bringing up this issue.

> A behavioral definition of such things as moods and emotions will be different than a cognitivist or neurophysiological or embodied enactivist one. I’m trying to find out which approach to psychology you are getting your definitions from.

Mine are ontological considerations that are not inspired by any of those scientific approaches or research programs you mentioned. However if you think that any among them could object to my understanding of moods as emotional dispositional states and emotions as actual states, I would like to hear which one and why.

> Soluble means salt will definitely dissolve in water. Bad mood doesn’t mean a person will definitely get angry.

Agreed, but that wouldn’t prove yet that moods are not dispositions, maybe would only prove that the dispositions of salt to dissolve in water are nomological and simple, while the dispositions of a person in bad mood are either nomological but hugely more complicated that the case of salt, or simply irreducible to nomological regularities.

> If calling mood an emotional disposition just means that in a given mood the chances of having a certain emotion are more probable than when not in that mood, then I agree. But this doesn’t seem very interesting to me if that’s all you’re trying to say.

Yes that’s all I’m trying to say. Even if it is not very interesting to you, we better agree on some background definitions before proceeding further.

> We don’t need to know any background motivation if we want to do a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood. We will end up treating ‘predisposition to emotion’ the way a person ignorant of chemistry treats solubility; in a very limited fashion with poor predictiveness.

Talking of “psychological acumen” was a quick way for me to show that I have no problems to admit different degrees of understanding emotions (and therefore also moods as emotional dispositions). So I have no doubts that having a background personal knowledge of motivations, characters, biographical episodes of someone’s life, or a background knowledge of human psychology as wise old men, priests, doctors, psychologists, and writers seem equipped with would boost our predictive capacity in deciphering human emotional life. But I wouldn’t be so dismissive even with rudimentary emotional assessments because their relevance and effectiveness may also depend on the social context: often to have a better understanding of the emotional life of an employer is not only practically unattainable but also unnecessary to correctly understand if it is the right moment e.g. to ask for a pay rise. In other words, often even “a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood” is good enough to navigate smoothly through many ordinary social interactions.

> What would help me at this point is to know if there are any particular writings-theories in psychology that have inspired your ontological descriptions of passion, mood, emotion and disposition.

Mine is just a philosophical exercise certainly inspired by what I read, but in a very broad sense: indeed I can’t point you to any specific author or text (FYI for quite a while I read just Heidegger, but it was long time ago). Besides I do not have any special interest in psychology, indeed my knowledge of the psychological literature is certainly very poor, not up-to-date and almost totally forgotten.

But I wouldn’t be so dismissive even with rudimentary emotional assessments because their relevance and effectiveness may also depend on the social context: often to have a better understanding of the emotional life of an employer is not only practically unattainable but also unnecessary to correctly understand if it is the right moment e.g. to ask for a pay rise. In other words, often even “a lousy, unreliable and superficial job at detecting mood” is good enough to navigate smoothly through many ordinary social interactions. — neomac

I agree. I suppose I’m biased by my background in theoretical psychology toward more complex assessments of personality. That’s particularly useful for psychotherapeutic analysis , but I can see how your perspective can be useful in industrial psychology settings.

I'm gonna stick my neck out and say that emotional "pie" hasn't, I fear, increased in size. Yuval Noah Harari, in his book Sapiens claims that the secret to economic growth is the enlargement of the, to keep it simple, "money pie" which meant that, paraphrasing, "my obesity doesn't come at the price of your starvation". We all get a larger slice of the money pie and as the economy grows, everybody's "happy" or, more accurately, nobody complains.

The "happiness pie", sorry to say, is still very much governed by zero-sum game dynamics/rules. My happiness comes at the expense of yours - there are winners and where there are winners, there are losers. This, I suppose, sums up our rather disheartening predicament.

Very loosely speaking that is...Make what you want of this.

@Joshs lately I don't have much time/concentration for intellectually challenging readings, but I very much appreciate your suggestions about "theoretical psychology" texts, if you can provide some titles (in pvt, if you prefer).

We all get a larger slice of the money pie and as the economy grows, everybody's "happy" or, more accurately, nobody complains. — Agent Smith

That’s mainly the result of increases in productivity, which is made possible by improvements in technology. That, in turn, depends on scientific progress. And science doesn’t operate in a cultural vacuum. Changes in scientific theory are interwoven with changes i. philosophical ideas, as well as changes in the arts, literature and political theory.

The "happiness pie", sorry to say, is still very much governed by zero-sum game dynamics/rules. My happiness comes at the expense of yours - there are winners and where there are winners, there are losers. This, I suppose, sums up our rather disheartening predicament. — Agent Smith

The question comes down to this: is there no correlation between cultural development and personal satisfaction? Is this aspect of human nature ‘fixed’?
I don’t believe happiness is a competition, because our goals and ways of looking at the world differ, and happiness depends on these factors.

Some considerations here are what authors like Steven Pinker would claim to be a profound decline in overall world violence of all forms as a result of the progress of knowledge. One could liken this progress to the enlightenment that takes place as one goes from
childhood to adulthood. How many of us really would prefer to live and think as the children we were instead of the adult we are now? I think my own childhood was typical, and I’d describe it as islands of intense but brief happiness surrounding by seas of fear.

That’s mainly the result of increases in productivity, which is made possible by improvements in technology. That, in turn, depends on scientific progress. And science doesn’t operate in a cultural vacuum. Changes in scientific theory are interwoven with changes i. philosophical ideas, as well as changes in the arts, literature and political theory. — Joshs

Yuval Noah Harari says as much. In his book Sapiens he says something that rings true: science and trade are fast buddies and scientists and business people have been running the show ever since, symbiotically united as it were.

As for culture, I guess it needs to be favorable for science and trade duet. As a case in point look at the Islamic empire. It stifled the scientific community to such an extent that traders were on their own and we all know how that story ended. Europe, lagging behind up to a point, caught up and left the Islamic world in the dust.

I don’t believe happiness is a competition — Joshs

I was speaking from Yuval Noah Harari's perspective. He points out that back when our forebears didn't realize that we could enlarge the resource pie, one person's affluence meant another person's penury. Well, now that's history but I feel this hasn't translated into an increase in our overall happiness (depression, anxiety, mental illnesses are on the rise). To me this means happiness is still a zero-sum game as it was in the past I suppose i.e. one person's happiness is another person's sorrow. Yuval Noah Harari may need to rethink his position on economics. Something doesn't add up. Maybe happiness and money aren't linked at all. We may have erred in assuming they are.

Mind and body primarily, but minor differences exist such as thoughts being like pathways while emotions being like landmasses.