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Capturing moods: a philosophical exploration

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Capturing Moods:
A Philosophical Exploration
by
Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kostochka
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
PHILOSOPHY
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Tatyana Aleksandrovna Kostochka
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My philosophy journey has been delightfully serendipitous. As I was heading into my
senior year of high school, I took a school trip to Japan and ended up sitting next to an older
student on the plane. He had just graduated and was heading to Brandeis University in the fall.
Because of him, I applied and ultimately decided to go to Brandeis. Once I arrived to Brandeis, I
joined a number of culture clubs associated with my East Asian Studies major but, as luck would
have it, the bulk of friends I made in those groups turned out to be philosophy majors. When my
parents and I were on a layover at Dulles International Airport, it was lucky that I was wearing a
Brandeis t-shirt. Jerry Samet, a professor in the Brandeis philosophy department, spotted my
shirt, approached my family, ate lunch with us, and planted the idea of minoring in philosophy.
Once I was considering continuing philosophy in graduate school, I was lucky that my partner at
the time was from northern Illinois which, in turn, made me look closer at the philosophy MA
program at Northern Illinois University. I was incredibly lucky that, on a last minute whim, I
added the University of Southern California to the list of PhD programs I applied to. It was lucky
that when I told my undergraduate advisor about heading to USC, he mentioned that he had a
friend in the USC religion department who worked on Buddhism—a topic that would become a
major influence on my work. It was lucky that when I signed up for presentations in Mark
Schroeder's seminar, the topics I wanted were already taken so I ended up presenting on
emotions. This presentation propelled me to look closer at moods which, ultimately, became the
topic of my dissertation.
Truly, the amount of happy coincidences is too long to list. The truth is, however, that
more than being a beneficiary of chance—the kind of chance that sat me next to someone who
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could tell me why I should apply to my future alma mater for the duration of a ten hour flight—
my real luck has come from the kindness and support of the people around me. Without these
people’s guidance, I would not be the person I am today. Without these people’s support, I would
not have been able to pick myself up every time I fell. I can never thank these people enough.
The following is my attempt to at least partially convey this gratitude.
First, I would like to thank Palle Yourgrau and Berislav Marušić. They took a chance on
me when I was just a loud and stubborn non-major in their class. As a sophomore, I signed up for
Palle Yourgrau’s Aristotle class as part of a kind of bet with a friend. Though I struggled
tremendously, Palle was kind and, at the end of the course, suggested I sign up for his class the
following term. Berislav Marušić and I met in my senior year. I had signed up for his philosophy
of action class having taken only two other philosophy courses (those two with Palle Yourgrau)
and no analytic philosophy. Halfway through that semester, I sat in Beri’s office asking him for a
recommendation to attend a philosophy MA program. Although he didn't yet have any evidence
that this was a reasonable request, he took me seriously. Through that year, he watched me
wrestle through my first serious encounters with philosophy and guided me at every turn. I am
also very grateful to Arnel Blake Batoon and Kevin Craven. I first met Blake in karate class but I
became friends with Blake when he saw me on campus crying and pulled me aside to comfort
me. He has been a source of good cheer since and his loyalty to his friends is unparalleled. Kevin
Craven is one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I have ever met. And I'm so lucky that I
got to spend so many weekends exploring Kyoto temples with him. Blake and Kevin's friendship
means the world to me and if it wasn't for their advice, I may have never taken any philosophy in
the first place.
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I would also like to thank the students and faculty I had the privilege to work with at
Northern Illinois University. NIU is where I truly came to love philosophy and the philosophy
community at NIU is like no other. From spending nights working together at the grad office to
talking shop at the local hockey dive bar, my fellow students kept me persevering—challenging
me when I needed to be challenged and comforting me when I needed to be comforted. Of the
amazing peers I met in DeKalb, I am particularly grateful to Teresa Allen, Jenni Anderson,
Emeka Anekwe, Michael and Amanda Ashfield, Daniel Buckley, Thomas Daventry-Shea, Kyle
Dickey, Emma Duncan, Jason Farr, Louis Gularte, William Hannegan, Renée Jorgensen, Katja
Kaelin, Griffin Klemick, Michael McCourt, Rodrigo Narbona, Josid Ridolfo, Adrian Seeley,
Julia and Micah Smith, Peter van Elswyk, Jesse Wilson, Brandon Williams, and Kevyn Gatlin.
From the NIU faculty, I would particularly like to thank Steve Daskal, Geoff Pynn, Alicia
Finch, Carl Gillett, Valia Allori, and David Buller. Steve Daskal was the first person to guide me
through my burgeoning interest in attention and was integral to helping me develop my interest
in moral psychology. Geoff Pynn and Alicia Finch are both incredible instructors, wonderful
friends, and paragons of the kind of philosopher I aim to one day be. Carl Gillett, Valia Allori,
and David Buller are the philosophers who made me appreciate the difficulties of scientific
inquiry and the importance of method. David Buller and Alicia Finch are also responsible for my
love of Carnap.
Since starting my PhD at the University of Southern California, I have been lucky enough
to benefit from the expertise and kindness of countless people both in and out of USC.
First, I would like to thank Natalie Schaad, the amazing department administrator for
most of my time here. Natalie is the best and I was so lucky to have her in my corner.
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I am extremely grateful to all the wonderful people who have helped me develop my
understanding of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. Although I lacked background knowledge
and skill, all of these mentors welcomed me and treated me with kindness as I struggled through
the fundamentals.
Lori Meeks has been an incredible mentor through my entire time at USC. When I
reached out to her out of the blue at the end of my first year, she worked with me both through
independent study and in seminar to help me learn the basics that I lacked. Through the years,
she advised me at every stage: in exploring my ideas, in choosing courses, in figuring out what
opportunities to pursue, in developing materials, and so on.
I would also like to thank Paul Groner. Meeting Paul Groner was another incredible
stroke of luck. While he was visiting USC, he allowed me to sit in on multiple seminars. In his
courses, I learned so much about core Buddhist texts, the field of Buddhist studies, and the
resources that Buddhism scholars use for their research. Moreover, Paul introduced me to the
work of the Japanese monk whose work I have been most interested in since—Ninkū. Further, he
also introduced me to scholars in Japan who would help me explore Ninkū's work.
This brings me to Yuka Ōtani and Akiya Murakami who took me under their wing for the
2019-2020 year while I was a visiting researcher at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. They
invited me into their Ninkū reading group where they patiently helped me work through the
medieval text we were reading. I am particularly grateful to Yuka Ōtani for fascinating
discussions and support.
Throughout this journey toward understanding Buddhism better, I received some amazing
language instruction. First, I would like to thank Eishi Ikeda for rekindling my love of the
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Japanese language and giving me a real appreciation for the beauty of grammar. I would also like
to thank David Bialock who not only welcomed me into his seminar but also met with me
weekly to tutor me in classical Japanese. I am also grateful to members of the 2019 USC
Kambun workshop and, specifically, Joan Piggott, who provided invaluable insight about the
nuances of translation. Finally, I am immeasurably indebted to the faculty and students of the
Inter-University Center for Japanese Studies in Yokohama. Spending that year in Yokohama not
only improved my Japanese but also changed the way I think. It is such a rare opportunity to be
able to spend a year working in a tight knit group of individuals with such varying interests—
everyone from entrepreneurs and businessmen to all sorts of humanities and social science
students. That year shaped a lot of the views that come out in my dissertation.
I owe a ton of gratitude to Nic Bommarito. I have looked up to Nic ever since I met him
on a graduate school visit at Brown. I had long had an interest in Buddhism but I didn't see it as
compatible with my work in philosophy. It was not until I met Nic that I realized that I could
pursue Buddhist philosophy, that I didn't even have to give up my interests in moral psychology
to do so. I have learned a tremendous amount from Nic.
Although I didn't get a chance to work with her as much as I wanted to, I would also like
to thank Rongdao Lai. She welcomed me into her seminar when I lacked all requisite
background and treated me with nothing but respect and encouraging kindness. Chats with
Rongdao have been some of the most perspective enhancing discussions I have had in graduate
school and I hope to have more opportunities to learn from her.
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Turning to my dissertation project, I am, of course, deeply indebted to my dissertation
committee: Lori Meeks, Janet Levin, Steve Finlay, Ralph Wedgwood, Nomy Arpaly, and my
dissertation chair, Mark Schroeder.
As I already mentioned, Lori Meeks' help was invaluable in me developing my interest in
Buddhism. However, she also provided helpful comments on my dissertation and my teaching
materials. I am forever grateful to Janet Levin, Steve Finlay, Ralph Wedgwood, and Nomy
Arpaly for extremely helpful and insightful discussions. I am incredibly lucky to have had the
opportunity to benefit from their various areas of expertise. Janet Levin has taught me so much
about philosophy of psychology and how to integrate empirical research into my own work.
Steve Finlay was always willing to give me a lot of feedback on my work and I learned a ton
from him about the importance of precision in writing. Chats with Ralph Wedgwood have
always led me to make new unexpected connections and to bring perspective to my work. Nomy
Arpaly has taught me so much about moral psychology and about the value of good examples
and nuance. I am also particularly grateful to Nomy Arpaly for her encouragement and support
through the COVID-19 pandemic. Although it has been a painfully trying time, Nomy's kindness
and fantastic sense of humor kept me going.
As is, I hope, evident at this point, my journey has been filled with exceptional mentors,
instructors, and advisors. However, no one has done as much to support me and my work as
Mark Schroeder. I would have quit so many times if it wasn't for Mark. There is a particular
instance that stands out clearly in my mind. In February 2017, I was having a rough time. I was
abroad in Japan and struggling. My mental health had deteriorated and I had no idea how to
proceed. So, I emailed Mark. I wrote him a long email telling him about all the things that have
vii
gone well in the last couple months. In the last paragraph, I finally cracked. I told him I was
"feeling completely frozen by burnout, anxiety, and depression." Even though morning was
barely dawning in California, Mark responded: "Hi, Tanya. Thanks for the update. Are you
available to Skype now?" He then spent almost two hours of his time talking me through the
things that have been making me feel so awful and providing encouragement. He then continued
to check in on me regularly until I returned back to the US. When I tell this to my friends, they
frequently say: "Wow, so impressed you had the courage to reach out." Their attitude is not apt.
There was nothing brave about it. Mark just made it clear through his advising style that he was
there to be reached out to—of course I reached out. Mark is an amazing philosopher and, of
course, I have benefitted immensely from philosophical discussions with him but it is Mark's
compassion that has made him an unparalleled mentor.
So far, I have largely focused on the role of mentors in my life but the truth is that I've
also been incredibly lucky in being surrounded by amazing peers. At USC, I'd like to first thank
my incoming cohort mates: Beth Allchurch, Alex Dietz, August Gorman, Joe Horton, Nathan
Howard, and Matt Leonard. I'd also like to thank the people I got to know in part through Mark
Schroeder's advisee workshop: David Clark, Josh Crabill, Jennifer Foster, Nick Laskowski, Alida
Liberman, Michael Milona, Dan Pallies, Caleb Perl, Christa Peterson, Abelard Podgorski, Dan
Pallies, Vishnu Sridharan, Shane Ward, and Vilma Venesma. This workshop been an endless
source of inspiration and philosophical community. Finally, I am grateful for all the other
wonderful comrades I've had over the years: Michael Ashfield, Rima Basu, Steve Bero, Megha
Devraj, Erik Encarnacion, Maegan Fairchild, Michael Fiorica, Jasmine Gunkel, Madiha Hamdi,
Renée Jorgensen, Nicola Kemp, Eleonore Neufeld, Laura Nicoară, Kenneth Silver, Andrew
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Stewart, Douglas Wadle, Aness Webster, and Jesse Wilson. At UCLA, I would like to thank Ian
Boon, Christian De Leon, Gabe Dupre, Gabbrielle Johnson, Kim Johnston, John Kardosh, Amber
Kavka Warren, Bill Kowalsky, Kevin Lande, and Ayana Samuel.
Before I move on, I would like to highlight a few of the graduate students who made my
time at USC particularly special. When I met Kenneth Silver on my graduate school visit to
USC, I thought: "Now I know I will be able to find friends here" and I was right. August Gorman
supported me through some of the hardest years of the program. Hanging out with them always
leaves my face hurting from laughter and my head buzzing with new ideas. Seeing Maegan
Fairchild always makes my day. She is one of the easiest people to work through things with—
both personal and philosophical. She also gave me the best birthday present I've ever received—
a surprise trip to the Renaissance Faire. Talking with her and Renée Jorgensen on Friday nights
(their Saturday mornings) has been one of the most healing weekly rituals I've ever had. Jesse
Wilson has entirely too many talents and I am lucky he sometimes emerges from the realm of the
ideal to hang out with me. Mike Ashfield and his family—Amanda, Charis, and Emmett—have
been like my own family to me in LA. I wish we got to see each other more than we did. Nicola
Kemp is the best ride or die you need. If it wasn't for her working in coffeeshops with me until 1
am, I would not have met any of my deadlines. Laura Nicoară's friendship got me through some
of the worst parts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Watching dramas, making mulled wine, randomly
doing planks, and talking philosophy with Laura are my best memories of stay-at-home.
Throughout the years, talking with Rima Basu and Gabbrielle Johnson has been one of the best
ways to blow off steam and cheer up. They are incisive and hilarious. Hanging out with them
feels like home! The fact that Ayana Samuel thinks I'm funny is one of the greatest compliments
ix
I've ever received. Michael Fiorica just gets me. Eleonore Neufeld is the best motivator and is so
charming that my parents—who have not met any of my other philosophy friends—told me:
"You have such cultured friends!" Amber Kavka Warren is a nerd in the best way, a punster (a
pun monster), the best roommate, and one of a tiny number of people I can talk to about literally
anything.
If this wasn't enough, I have also had the unbelievable luck to have some amazingly
supportive friends outside of philosophy—friends who have kept me laughing, who have given
me love and perspective. Emily Tardiff has been an absolute rock of support. She always has
something fascinating on her mind and she also has pet chickens, which is so cool! Being around
Francesca Pizarro always brings a burst of energy. She is fearless and confident! She is the kind
of person you'd wish to be by your side when everything goes wrong—Francesca will know
what to do! Sanaa Semyon is the kind of friend who will drop everything to help you, whether it
means letting you stay with her for weeks on a day's notice or spending the full day before your
job talk helping you fine-tune your presentation. She is fierce and resplendent in her joy. My co-
conspirator in fandom endeavors, Jackie Hedeman, and I have been friends for so long that she
probably still remembers the bad poetry I wrote in high school. I hope this dissertation shows my
style has improved since.
Finally, I'd like to thank my family. I wouldn't have been able to do this without you.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements………………………….….…………………………………………………ii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………..….………………xi
Introduction………………………………………..………………………………………………1
Chapter 1: Why Moods Change: Their Appropriateness and Connection to Beliefs…………….. 7
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..7
2. The common ground…………………………………………………………………. .10
2.1 Shared features of moods and emotions…………………………………….. 11
2.2 Differences between moods and emotions………………………………….. 13
3. Belief-responsiveness of moods and emotions………………………………………..16
3.1 The case against the belief-responsiveness of moods………………………..16
3.2 What does it mean to respond to changes in belief?…………………………17
3.3 Belief-responsive moods……………………………………………………..19
3.4 A direct connection………………………………………………………….. 22
3.4.1 Explanation and cognitive penetrability of mood………………….22
3.4.2 Systematicity……………………………………………………… 24
3.5 Maintaining the orthodox view and small emotions…………………………26
3.6 Emotions aren't that smart……………………………………………………28
4. Appropriateness of moods and emotions…………………. …………………………..31
4.1 Appropriate/inappropriate moods……. …………………….………………. .31
4.2 Two sources of skepticism for the appropriateness of moods………………. 36
4.2.1 The range of appropriate moods………………………….……….. 36
4.2.2 The frequency of evaluating moods for appropriateness…………. .39
5. Conclusion..……………….………..………….………………………………………40
Chapter 2: The Tyranny of Good Mood and Why Attention is What It's All About….………….42
1. Introduction……………….………..………….……………………………………… 42
2. The dominance of good moods……..…………..…………………………………….. 43
2.1 Doing the right thing……..………….………………………………………. 44
2.2 Getting it right……..………….………….…………………………………. .47
2.3 Getting what we want……..………….………………………………………49
2.4 Mood norms……..………….……………………………………………….. 50
3. In praise of bad moods……..………….……………………………………………… 51
3.1 The many dimensions of mood………………………………………………52
3.2 Complex good moods and complex bad moods…………………………….. 56
3.2.1 Doing the right thing…………………….. …… ………………….. 56
3.2.2 Getting it right…………………………………….………………..59
3.2.3 Getting what we want …………….………………………………..64
4. Attention……………………………………………………………………………….64
4.1 Attention effects on desire, belief, and action…………….…………………. 65
4.1.1 Desire and attention……………………………………………….. 66
4.1.2 Beliefs and attention………………………………………………. 67
4.1.3 Actions and attention……………………………………………….67
4.2 Moods and attention………………………………………………………….68
5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………. 72
Chapter 3: Moods are Patterns of Attention……………………………………………….……..73
1. Introduction…………………………………………………………………………… 73
2. Why constitution?…………………………………………………………………….. 73
2.1 Dispositions to attend………………………………………………….……..74
2.2 Merely causal relationship…………………………………………….…….. 77
2.2.1 Moods' connection beliefs………………………………………… 77
2.2.2 Moods' effect on motivation and accuracy……………….……….. 79
2.3 Constitution and the causal relationship between moods and attention……. .81
3. The Account…………………………….…………………………………………….. 84
3.1 Objects………………………………………………….…………………… 84
3.2 Sequence…………………………………………………………………….. 85
3.3 Duration…………………………………………………………….……….. 86
3.4 Intensity…………………………….………………………………….……..87
3.5 Effort….………………………………………….………………………….. 87
4. Which patterns?……………………………..………….…………………………….. 89
5. The objects of attention……………………………………………..…………………92
5.1 Which objects?………………..………….…………………..………………92
5.2 The globality and intentionality of moods……….………………………….. 95
6. Individuating moods………………………………………………………………….. 99
6.1 Sorting patterns ……………………….……..………….…………..………100
6.2 How many moods at a time?………………………………………………..103
6.3 Who has moods? ……………………………………………………………104
7. Conclusion…………………………….……………………………………………. .106
Chapter 4: Varieties of Mood Experience……………………………………………………… 109
1. Introduction…………………………………………………….……………………. 109
2. Data for cultural variation in moods………………………………………………… 110
3. Possible solutions in existing accounts……………………………………………… 112
3.1 Valence and energy………………………………………………………… 113
3.2 The hope for a cognitivist account…………………………………………. 115
4. The patterns of attention account and mood variation………………………………. 119
4.1 Individuating moods and colors……………………………………………. 119
4.2 Cultural variability in moods and colors……………………………………121
5. Conclusion…………………………………………….…………………………….. 124
References………………………………………………………………………………………126
ABSTRACT
Moods affect almost every aspect of our daily experience. They affect how the world
appears to us, how we form beliefs, and how we process information. They change how we feel
(mentally as well as physically), what we remember, what strikes us as important, and what
motivates us. Some moods make it easy to be kind and generous while others make it more
difficult. Moreover, they do all this while remaining largely in the background of our experience.
My dissertation develops a new account of moods. The view is that moods are constituted by
patterns of attention. When we are in a serene mood, we attend to different things than when we
are in melancholy mood, or a frustrated mood, or a chipper mood. Some of this is voluntary—we
focus on different aspects of ourselves and our environment—but much is involuntary—some
things just capture our attention. I argue that this view of moods as patterns of attention allows us
to account for many things, including: how moods can respond to our beliefs, how moods can
have moral, epistemic, and practical roles, and how there can be variation in moods across
cultures. I lay the view out in three stages. In the first part, I tease out some features of mood that
have not been previously recognized in the philosophical literature. In the second part, I lay out
my patterns of attention account. Finally, in the third part, I provide an application that shows
how fruitful embracing the patterns of attention view can be.
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INTRODUCTION
Hello! I’m so glad you picked up this dissertation. I hope things are going well with you,
that you are having a nice day, and that you had a restful night of sleep last night. I hope that all
of these things have contributed to you being in a mood that will allow you to find my writing
engaging and persuasive. Moods, after all, play a profound role in the way that we perceive
ourselves, others, and the world around us.
On one hand, we can imagine moods as tinted lenses. As we go about our life, the world
is presented through the shades we are wearing. Some lenses make it hard to see certain features
of the world. To quote Wanda, the owl from Bojack Horseman: "When you look at someone
through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags" (Sethi et al., 2015). Other
lenses help us see the world more accurately. Sunglasses, for one, help us see better in bright
light. Other lenses can just highlight different things.
And so it is with moods. Some days our moods make us worse at seeing the world; others
make us better. Still others just highlight different features of the world. Some days the world
looks wonderful. On other days—boring. On other days yet—hateful and cruel.
On this way of seeing things, moods are a barrier between us and the world, they
determine which parts of the world get in, so to speak.
On the other hand, we can imagine moods as molds for our selves—every new mood
changes us, shapes us into a different form.
What we want in one mood, we do not want in another. Going out to a concert may sound
great when you buy the ticket, but when the day comes, it may sound absolutely awful.
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What we value in one mood, we don't value in another. In one mood, you may feel like
your friend’s trusting disposition is wonderful because of the way it expresses his kindness. In
another mood, that same disposition is a manifestation of his overly sheltered naïveté.
What we believe in one mood, we don't believe in another. In one mood, you may think
that so-and-so maliciously messed things up for you while, in another mood, they seem like they
just made a careless mistake.
As our moods keep unfurling, we keep changing with them.
The truth is—moods are both lenses and molds. They shape us and the way we see
everything else.
Since moods are such a major part of our lives, it is not surprising that various features of
mood have been brought up in many different philosophical debates. Most prominently,
philosophers of mind have extensively debated whether it is possible to have an intentionalist
theory of moods. In moral psychology, some have argued that mood effects on motivation
present a challenge to virtue ethics' notion of character, to motivational internalism, and to the
guise of the good thesis. Talk of moods pervades aesthetics, both in discussions of genre and of
our relationships to art. Some have brought moods up in the context of moral responsibility or
even in philosophy of language!
Despite all this, there is still a surprising dearth of work that addresses what moods are.
Indeed, even among existing views, we frequently see philosophers build their accounts starting
from a commitment about a different aspect of our psychology—seeing if they can fit moods into
a particular theory of mind or seeing if they can extend their theory of emotions to moods.
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This dissertation is my best attempt to step away from this approach—to start with moods
first—and develop a new view. The view I propose is that moods are constituted by patterns of
attention. When we are in a serene mood, we attend to different things than when we are in
melancholy mood, or a frustrated mood, or a chipper mood. Some of this is voluntary—we focus
on different aspects of ourselves and our environment—but much is involuntary—some things
just capture our attention.
I lay the view out in three stages.
The first part consists of chapters one and two. In these chapters, I tackle some common
assumptions about moods, both in the philosophical literature and in the broader culture. I argue
that each of these assumptions is false and lay the groundwork for my attention-centered view of
moods.
In the first chapter, “Why Moods Change,” I turn to assumptions that philosophers have
frequently made about the difference between moods and emotions. Emotions, they say, respond
to changes in our beliefs and can be evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate. So, if I become
angry at someone for performing some act and then come to believe they didn’t do it, I will no
longer be angry. Moreover, my anger could be assessed in light of the circumstances and deemed
either appropriate or inappropriate. On the other hand, the common assumption goes, moods
have neither of these features. If I come to be in an anxious mood and then come to believe
there’s nothing to be anxious about, that will have no direct effect on my mood.
I argue that this assumption about how moods and emotions interact with beliefs are
based on unrepresentative examples and a simplistic view of what it means to be belief-
responsive. By overemphasizing how belief-responsive emotions are and failing to see the ways
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moods respond to beliefs, we dismiss all the profound ways in which rational and arational
factors come together to determine the shape of both our emotions and our moods. Through a
thorough examination of more realistic cases, I demonstrate that moods, in fact, are frequently
belief-responsive and can be evaluated for appropriateness along a number of dimensions. In the
process, I suggest that having an account of moods that takes patterns of attention as a
constitutive part of moods can explain this connection between moods and beliefs in a way that
is particularly helpful.
In the second chapter, "The Tyranny of Good Mood and Why Attention is What It's All
About," I address another, even more prevalent assumption about moods—the assumption that
good moods aren't only good because they feel good but also because they put us in the best
position as agents. That is, whether it is acting morally, acting in accordance with our moral
judgments, forming accurate beliefs about the world, or being successful in our goals, good
moods are best. We see this background framework in the philosophical literatures on moral
motivation and character, in the very foundations of widespread therapy practices like CBT, and
in the best-selling popular books touting the marvels of positive thinking. Through a careful
examination of the psychological literature, I show that the issue is much more complicated.
There are plenty of bad moods that are morally, epistemically, and prudentially better than some
good moods. I argue that the key to whether a particular mood is better along these lines than
another is what patterns of attention it involves.
Having warmed us up to the idea that attention is a key feature of moods, I move on to
the second part of my dissertation and present my account. In chapter three, "Moods are Patterns
of Attention," I argue that we should take patterns of attention to be constitutive of moods. If we
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try to posit a different kind of relationship between moods and attention—a merely causal or a
dispositional one—not only do we make bad predictions about when moods change but we also
lose the explanation for how moods have the roles I discuss in the first two chapters. Once
constitution is on the table, I lay out the view, explaining both what I mean by "pattern of
attention," which patterns of attention are mood patterns, how moods are individuated, and
whether they are intentional. I also lay out a number of possible applications for the view.
Finally, the third part of my dissertation examines how the patterns of attention view can
help us understand moods in a broader context. Chapter five, "Varieties of Mood Experience,"
applies the view to the puzzle of cultural variation. A number of authors have noted that there
seems to be some cultural variation in emotions—not only do different cultures have different
emotion concepts, but the same emotions also seem to have different features depending on
culture. There is some evidence that these types of cultural variation occur in moods as well.
Like with emotion, there are different mood concepts—Russian toska and Danish/Norweigian
hygge are mood terms that do not translate well to any English-language mood. But there are
also interesting differences in the features of moods—which mood best predict depression and
whether mood affects one’s evaluations of one’s own attractiveness are among the things that
vary depending on culture. The tricky part is to have an account of mood that can predict the
right kinds of cultural differences in mood and explain why these differences arise. I argue that
unlike the other candidates, the patterns of attention account predicts just the right amount of
cultural variation in moods and it explains why these differences would arise in different
cultures. I also argue that this explanation extends to other kinds of observed variations in mood
including those based on gender and class.
5
With the exception of chapter 3, each of these chapters was originally written as a stand-
alone article. In editing them together, I have done my best to take out redundancies and to stitch
them into a coherent whole. This has particularly resulted in chapter 4 being quite short. Still,
because of the structure of this dissertation, there are some important themes that reoccur in
every chapter and those are, ultimately, the points that I hope to convey to you, dear reader.
I will limit myself to pointing out two of them here. First, even though I present a
particular reductive account of moods, my ultimate goal is to demonstrate how varied, complex,
and nuanced moods truly are. Second, although our moods are ours, they intimately involve
things outside of us. It is not just our personal and subpersonal states that shape our moods. The
things that exist around us, by shaping our attention, shape our moods as well. It is not just things
like our desires or the amount of coffee we drank, it is also the daily surroundings, the spaces, the
community, the society that we exist in that mold and shape our moods and, in turn, our very
being.
I wish you a good mood for reading!
6
CHAPTER 1
WHY MOODS CHANGE:
THEIR APPROPRIATENESS AND CONNECTION TO BELIEFS
1. Introduction
When I tell someone that I am angry because “so-and-so mistreated me,” there is an
important relationship that holds between my anger and the belief that I have been wronged. If
my interlocutor convinced me that I had not been mistreated, my anger would likely go away
too. If, at some point, I came to believe that I was wronged after all, my anger would likely
return. Based on the observation that our emotions respond to changes in our beliefs,
philosophers have speculated about when it is intelligible, fitting, or otherwise appropriate to
have certain emotional reactions. Arguments about the rationality of emotions have generated a
rich philosophical literature on the topic of emotions.
Until recently, however, there has been little attention paid to a relative of the emotions—
moods. This has nothing to do with moods being irrelevant to major philosophical discussions.
On the contrary, moods have been brought up in the context of debates in various philosophical
subfields including ethics (Stark 2015), moral responsibility (Madva 2017), moral psychology
(Stocker 1979), philosophy of mind (Kind 2014; Mendelovici 2013; Kriegel 2019), philosophy
of language (Heck 2012), and aesthetics (Carroll 2003; Krebs 2017; Sauchelli 2014). Despite
this, discussions of the nature of moods are still relatively few. One of the key reasons for this, I
believe, is that moods are taken to be entirely disengaged from our beliefs. Unlike emotions,
moods are seen as neither belief-responsive nor evaluable for appropriateness.
7
This assumption about moods is pervasive. Even those who have said something more
extensive about moods have typically actively accepted that moods are not connected to beliefs
in this way (DeLancey 2006; Deonna and Teroni 2009; Hatzimoysis 2019; Lormand 1985; Sizer
2000). Indeed, Sizer (2000)’s argument for her view of moods—that moods are sets of biases in
our functional architecture—is built on the observation that moods lack this connection. Deonna
and Teroni (2009, p. 363) concisely state this position: “[A]lthough moods and emotions share a
number of important traits, they differ crucially: since moods are disconnected from any
evaluative outlook, we understand them as a-rational states.”
More recently, philosophers like Mitchell (2019), Kriegel (2019), and Rossi (2019) have,
to varying degrees, embraced the thought that moods may be assessed as appropriate or
inappropriate and be rationally intelligible. Each of these accounts is incredibly valuable for
expanding our understanding of moods. Yet, for each of these authors, moods’ appropriateness
and connection to beliefs is something that they are led to embrace because it is a consequence of
what they take to be the winning view. Rossi (2019) in particular starts with the assumption that
one of the apparent features of moods is that they do not have this connection and once his
account suggests that they should, he argues that, all things considered, it is not so repugnant to
think of moods this way.
Taking the idea that moods are not entirely arational seriously because it is entailed by
particular theories is an important step in the right direction. But I think that we must go further
and embrace this as a key feature of what moods are. The claim that moods are not connected to
1
This is not without some precedent. Although they come at the topic from the point of view of
1
psychology and therefore focus on different issues, passages in Parkinson et al. (1996) suggest they take it
as a general feature of moods that they respond to changes in belief (p. 7).
8
rational or evaluative states is largely motivated by appeal to unrealistic and limited cases. The
aim of this chapter is to show that once we consider a broader range of realistic cases, we can see
that moods, too, have a connection to beliefs that needs to be explained by any adequate account
of mood.
Moreover, for every case in which moods seem to be disconnected from beliefs, I will
argue that there are analogous cases for emotions. In other words, I think that the connection
between moods and beliefs has been minimized because the connection between emotions and
beliefs has been overstated. Although emotions might be more judgment-sensitive than moods,
they are not judgment-sensitive in a different way.
In this chapter, I argue that both moods and emotions can (1) respond to beliefs, (2)
respond to arational factors, and (3) be evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate in a number of
important ways.
I go about this in four stages.
First, I lay out some common ground about moods and emotions, the features they share,
and the features typically taken to tell them apart. I do not attempt to define what these states are
or to place stringent conditions on what it takes to be one of them. My aim is simply to draw out
some of our commonsense intuitions about moods and emotions, as well as to point out those
features on which philosophers have previously focused.
In the following section, I address the issue of moods’ belief-responsiveness. I begin by
presenting the grounds for thinking that moods lack this feature. Then, through a careful look at
what it takes to be a belief-responsive state combined with some more realistic examples, I show
that moods can and frequently do respond to changes in belief. Furthermore, I argue that this
9
connection between moods and beliefs is direct and the asymmetry between how belief-
responsive moods are and how belief-responsive emotions are is not nearly as stark as some
suppose.
In the third section, I turn to judgments of appropriateness. I demonstrate that we can and
do evaluate moods as appropriate or inappropriate along a number of different dimensions. I also
discuss why it is that we criticize moods, both our own and those of other people, less than we
criticize emotions.
Finally, I provide some upshots to this discussion.
2. The common ground
Before we dive into exploring the controversial claim that moods—not just emotions—
have a connection to beliefs, it is important to first get an idea of which affective states fall into
which of these two categories. So, let me provide some examples. Paradigm cases of moods are:
cheerfulness, irritability, anxiousness, melancholy, contentedness, and so on. Paradigm cases of
emotions are: joy, anger, fear, guilt, sorrow, and so on.
This kind of distinction can get us on the right track but can leave us confused about how
to extend these lists because of two problems.
First, it can be difficult to get at the right sense of mood because words like “anxious”
and “depressed” so frequently come up in the context of both everyday moods and mental health
conditions. We should be careful not to conflate the two. Mental health conditions are not simply
moods gone wrong. Sure enough, a depressed mood is likely to show up as one symptom of
clinical depression, but there is a lot more to a disorder. Not just that, but the features of moods
10
in mental health conditions are often importantly unlike the paradigm features of moods. So, for
2
the purposes of this chapter, mood words like “depressed” and “anxious” will not refer to clinical
mental health conditions.
The second problem is that our mood and emotion vocabularies tend to overlap. For
example, popular sources tend not to be concerned with drawing any particular distinction
between the two. And even in academic literature, there is disagreement. Some use “sad” as an
example of a mood while others use it as a paradigm example of an emotion. This shouldn’t lead
us to believe that either side is confused or that there is no distinction to be made. Our words are
simply not our best guides sometimes and we use the same word to describe two different,
though related, states.
So, to get a better grasp on moods and emotions, I want to outline the features these states
have in common and those most frequently taken to tell them apart.
2.1 Shared features of moods and emotions
There are a number of features that philosophers agree emotions and moods have in
common. Both moods and emotions are states that take place at a particular time, have certain
durations, and—at least for their paradigm cases—have phenomenological character.
Moods in mental health conditions are frequently less stable, more intense, and more motivating than
2
everyday moods. Mental health conditions may also involve moods that differ from everyday moods in
their intentionality. For example, clinical anxiety can involve moods that are both more general than a
regular anxious mood (as in the case of completely free-floating anxiety) and moods that have a more
specific object than a regular anxious mood (as in the case of a social anxiety where anxiety is triggered
by very particular types of social circumstances). I want to thank an anonymous referee for this important
point.
11
Both are frequently associated with certain bodily states. A depressed mood is associated
with lowered gaze and sluggishness; fear is associated with dilated pupils and hairs on our arms
standing up.
Emotions and moods also both have a strong and complex connection to the way we
attend. When in an irritable mood, one’s attention is drawn to unpleasant aspects of the
environment: this other person is chewing too loudly, the lights in this room are too bright, and
this chair is incredibly uncomfortable. The case of emotions is the same. When one is
experiencing embarrassment, for example, one’s attention goes to features of the embarrassing
incident: the salsa is everywhere, I am such a klutz, and my face is so red.
Both moods and emotions are states which we can fail to be aware of or be positively
mistaken about. People frequently find themselves in the position of being confused about what
emotion they are experiencing. It can be hard to tell, for example, when faced with a new
situation, whether one feels fear or excitement. Indeed, we can fool ourselves into thinking that
we’re excited when, actually, we are scared. Similarly, we can fail to be aware of what mood we
are in. We might find out that we have been irritable all day by looking back and noticing that we
had snapped at a number of people earlier. Moreover, before making this discovery, we might
3
fool ourselves into thinking that we had been in a good mood.
Certainly, sometimes, it can be introspectively difficult to tell moods apart from
emotions: am I simply in a bad mood or am I upset that I had to get up extra early for something
I am not excited about? Am I just feeling chipper or am I happy to have gotten tickets to a show I
want to see?
For a discussion of the various difficulties of trying to introspect our moods, see Haybron (2007),
3
Schwitzgebel (2019) and Ryle (2009, pp. 87–88).
12
2.2 Differences between moods and emotions

All these similarities notwithstanding, many philosophers have been eager to draw a
sharp line between moods and emotions (Deonna and Teroni 2009; Nussbaum 2001; Wong
2016). The view from psychological literature is much less clear. With some exceptions (Siemer
2005, 2009), psychologists do not make a point to distinguish between moods and emotions or at
least don’t see them as different in kind. My view is that moods and emotions are not so
4
different after all. Still, granting that they are, in fact, different, let us look at a few features that
have been commonly said to tell moods and emotions apart.
5
One difference that has been highlighted in some of the literature is their duration (Ben-
Ze’ev 2017; Berkowitz 2000; Brown 1965; Damasio 1999; Lormand 1985). Moods are said to
last longer than emotions do—irritability lasts longer, generally speaking, than rage does.
Naturally, if we’re thinking about long-lasting emotions—things like love or resentment—the
asymmetry goes the other way. Moods seem to be shorter.
6
There is also an asymmetry in the intensity of the two states. Emotions are typically more
intense (Berkowitz 2000; Lane and Terry 2000; Lang 1988; Parkinson et al. 1996). Though
moods can have a very strong and distinctive phenomenology, emotions are usually more
Many use the terms interchangeably. Others, like Schwarz and Clore (2003), take moods and emotions
4
to be distinct but not different in kind. For Schwarz and Clore, both moods and emotions are feelings but
emotions are feelings directed at particular objects and moods are undirected.
For a survey of the literature on the differences between emotions and moods, see Beedie et al. (2005).
5
Moods may also have a long term analog: stable moods that persist in some form or other over years or
6
decades. Ben-Ze’ev (2017) takes happiness to be this kind of enduring mood.
13
draining, more distracting, and overall more consuming. Sometimes, moods feel like emotions
with the volume turned down.
Another distinction concerns their ubiquity. Plausibly, there are times when we are
conscious and yet we do not feel any emotions but there is no time at which we are conscious but
not in a mood (Brown 1965; Heidegger 2010; Searle 2004). Heidegger (2010, p. 131) argued that
were we to try to come up with a counterexample to the claim that we’re always in a mood—
were we to try to describe such a state—we would only find that we have described a very
specific mood. Put another way, moods are like the weather: while rainy or cloudy may well be
paradigm cases of weather, the absence of them is not the absence of weather but rather a
distinctive kind of weather.
One more distinction is that moods are more global than emotions (Carroll 2003;
Chomanski 2018; Fish 2005; Roberts 2003; Sizer 2000). Moods affect our entire experience.
When we wear colored lenses, everything is tinted. So it is with moods. A bad mood doesn’t
7
only make me feel negatively about the things at hand, but whatever comes up, my mood will
color that experience negatively as well. Emotions, on the other hand, are more local. They affect
how we perceive the object of our emotions and, frequently, things associated with those objects.
Many things remain untouched by the emotion.
Finally, the most frequently drawn and discussed distinction between moods and
emotions concerns the intentionality of these states. That is, there is an asymmetry between how
intentional or object-directed moods and emotions are (Ben-Ze’ev 2017; Berkowitz 2000; Brown
There has been some discussion about how far this analogy can go. Fish (2005), Roberts (2003), and
7
Chomanski (2018) take the analogy very seriously and put forward perceptualist theories of moods.
Gallegos (2017) is more skeptical of the lens metaphor, going instead for a nearby view of moods as
“interpretive frames.”
14
1965; Carroll 2003; Damasio 1999; Goldie 2000; Lormand 1985; Nussbaum 2001; Schwarz and
Clore 2003; Solomon 1984). Some philosophers endorse a very strong version of the principle:
they take the distinction to be that emotions are always about something and moods never are
(Bollnow 2017; Nussbaum 2001; Sizer 2000). Other philosophers have denied this claim but
proposed other distinctions based on intentionality: that more emotions are object-directed than
moods or that the object of emotions is less general than the object of moods (Ben-Ze’ev 2017;
Goldie 2000; Prinz 2004; Solomon 1984). Yet others proposed that emotions and moods are
intentional in a broader sense of intentionality (Mitchell 2019; Kriegel 2019). Others still have
taken moods and emotions to both be intentional but have objects that are different in kind
(Mendelovici 2013; Rossi 2019). A lot of the debate about moods revolves around the issue of
intentionality. I will return to the discussion of the intentionality of moods in section 5.3 of
Chapter 3, but to remain neutral here, I will proceed on the assumption that the object of moods,
but not emotions, can be particularly difficult to specify.
As we have seen throughout this section, there are both important similarities and
important differences between moods and emotions. Some differences, like duration and
intensity, place moods and emotions at different points on the same spectrum. Ubiquity,
globality, and intentionality, on the other hand, may suggest a deeper distinction. So, having laid
out this characterization, I will now move on to the topic of belief-responsiveness.
15
3. Belief-responsiveness of moods and emotions
3.1 The case against the belief-responsiveness of moods
When I say “belief-responsiveness,” I am using it as shorthand for the tendency of the
relevant state to respond to changes in belief or judgment. The reason I focus on this type of
responsiveness is twofold. First, it is an accepted feature of emotions. Second, it is this standard
which moods have frequently been accused of failing to meet.
Let us look at a couple of examples. Laura Sizer (2000, p. 747) says in “Towards a
Computational Theory of Moods”: “The nonspecific feeling that nothing is going your way or
that everything looks bleak is not tied to any beliefs about the world and is not easily affected by
changes in our beliefs.” Sizer does not rule out that moods can be affected by beliefs, but holds
that they can only do so via some intermediary. Martha Nussbaum takes an even stronger stance.
In Upheavals of Thought (2001, p. 134), she says: “There are many cases of depression that are
genuine moods, caused by chemistry without the intervention of belief and unresponsive to
changes in situation or belief.”
The case for this contrast between the belief-responsiveness of moods and the belief-
responsiveness of emotions comes from looking at cases like Angry and Anxious, which I have
adapted from Deonna and Teroni (2009).
Angry: Kalau gets angry at Francesca for making a remark that he takes to be
insulting. Francesca explains that Kalau misheard what she said. Kalau stops
being angry.
Anxious: Cyrus is in an anxious mood because of all the coffee he drank. He does
some stretches and drinks caffeine-free tea for the rest of the day and his mood
improves.
16
We can see that in Angry there is a change in Kalau’s beliefs about the content of Francesca’s
comment that guides the changes in his emotions. On the other hand, neither Cyrus’s caffeine
levels nor his stretches have anything to do with his beliefs. Though these are realistic, perhaps
even representative, cases, saying that moods are arational states requires claiming that all moods
pattern with Anxious. This view is typically accompanied by the claim that, overwhelmingly,
emotions pattern with Angry but not with Anxious. So, my aim is to show that there are many
moods that pattern with Angry and many emotions that pattern with Anxious.
To do so, I’d like to start by thinking about what it takes for us to consider a state belief-
responsive.
3.2 What does it mean to respond to changes in belief?
Belief-responsiveness exists on a spectrum. On one side, we have the ideally responsive
states that change immediately and completely the moment that a change in belief occurs. Think,
for example, of the annoyance that no one has mentioned one’s birthday disappearing the
moment one realizes one has arrived to a surprise birthday party. The annoyance is gone as if it
never existed. Angry is framed like this type of ideal case.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have states that remain absolutely unchanged
despite apparently relevant changes in belief. Here, we can think of an intense hypochondriac’s
belief that they have a serious illness despite repeated tests, their doctor’s testimony to the
contrary, second opinions from other doctors, assurances that the doctors are aware of any
special circumstances, evidence that the doctors aren’t basing their judgments off of some bias,
17
technical checks of testing equipment, and so on. In such a case, the attitude resists change in all
the kinds of circumstances that we might expect to reasonably change it.
Most cases, however, are not so simple; most cases are somewhere in the middle between
completely and immediately responsive to changes in the relevant beliefs and completely non-
responsive. Just like it sometimes takes a while to believe something when given reasons to, it
frequently takes time for emotion to build or to diminish.
Imagine someone who was in a car accident and the other driver had died. They feel
extreme guilt because they blame themselves for the death but some experts tell them that the
crash was not their fault. They may not feel fine immediately, but this testimony may be a
catalyst for a slow and steady decrease in their feelings of guilt. Or yet again, imagine a boss
making an unreasonable request of their employee. At first, the employee may feel only mildly
annoyed about it despite knowing that it’s unreasonable and then finding themselves growing
increasingly livid throughout the day.
In each of these cases, we can correctly say that a belief kicked off the change—finding
out the crash was not their fault, thinking something unreasonable was demanded of them—even
though the immediate change was only slight. Although these attitudes do not respond in that
ideal complete and immediate way, they are, in fact, belief-responsive.
This is important because I think part of people’s resistance to seeing moods as belief-
responsive is that moods typically shift gradually rather than suddenly. And if our only paradigm
for belief-responsive states is one where the state follows the idealized complete and immediate
pattern, we may miss all the ways in which moods are belief-responsive.
18
3.3 Belief-responsive moods
Consider the following case:
Cheer up: Jason has been feeling dejected all day—everything seems to be going
wrong. Once home, he calls a friend who reframes Jason’s day for him: isn’t
Jason making slow but steady progress on work and wasn’t his lunch tasty and
didn’t he get to listen to his favorite podcast on the way home? When Jason
finally hangs up, he is not in a good mood but he is slightly less dejected and little
by little his mood improves from then on.
The change of mood is belief-responsive. It is immediate—not in the sense that it happens
quickly and completely—but in the sense that Jason’s mood begins to improve when his beliefs
about his situation change.
Let us look at a contrast case. Imagine if Jason’s friend said, instead: “I know you’re in a
bad mood, so why don’t you have a snack?” Eating a snack would also likely raise Jason’s mood.
But it would do so in a different way.
Both cases have the friend’s words result in Jason’s mood getting better. If Jason
frequently forgets to eat, the friend’s words might even be required for Jason’s mood to change.
But the way that his friend’s comforting words lift his spirits is not the same as the
recommendation of a snack. In the first case, the mood responds to the content provided by the
friend’s words. In the second, his mood responds to the nutrients from the snack.
To put it another way, just hearing the friend’s comforting words won’t put Jason in a
better mood. To be put in a better mood by a friend’s comment requires apprehending the content
of the words, recognizing their truth, feeling the friend means what he says, and so on. It requires
changes in Jason’s beliefs. To deny that Jason’s mood changes with his beliefs in the Cheer Up
case is to deny the intuitive difference between that case and the variant snack case.
19
Once Jason internalizes his friend’s words, the process of mood change—even though it
may be slow, gradual change—begins immediately. In the snack case, while the friend’s words
may well invite Jason to have the snack, it is eating the snack that kicks off the process of mood
change. Of course it is possible that even in the snack case, the content of the friend’s words
might change Jason’s mood a bit. Perhaps, if he forgot to eat, the friend’s suggestion may get
Jason to believe that he will feel better soon (once he eats the snack). The realization that the bad
mood will soon be over can itself improve Jason’s mood a little. In that situation, however, like
in the original Cheer Up case, Jason’s mood changes in response to changes in belief.
It is important to note that Jason’s bad mood doesn’t have to turn into a good mood or
even a neutral mood for us to think that his shift in mood is belief-responsive. Kalau may remain
a bit angry at Francesca even after she explains her comment. Possibly, he doesn’t take her
explanation to be sufficient not to be angry at all or his anger is only partially belief-responsive.
Either way, his anger is responding to changes in belief. Similarly, Jason may remain a bit sullen
after the phone call. Perhaps, the friend’s words don’t fully change Jason’s outlook on his day or
perhaps Jason’s mood is only partially belief-responsive. The point is, it is still responding to
beliefs.
Let’s consider another pair of contrasting cases.
Street harassment: June leaves home for work in a good mood. On her walk to
the train she notices a guy leering at her as she walks by. On the train, the person
sitting next to her sits a little too close. On the walk to the office, someone yells
out: “Don’t you look nice! Where are you going?” She is annoyed at each of these
things though she doesn’t find them jarring. As she comes in to work, she finds
that her mood has spoiled.
Street harassment (variant): Everything is exactly the same except for June’s
epistemic position. June knows that the man who called out to her compulsively
20
compliments people and asks where they’re going. He never makes any further
comment or follows anyone. And he does this to everyone in the same way,
irrespective of gender-presentation. Further, she knows that the leering person was
squinting creepily because he thought he knew her but couldn’t quite see without
his glasses. Imagine that she knew that the person who sat closer than she’d like
was from Russia, where it is socially appropriate to get closer to strangers than it
is in the US. In other words: June knows that none of her experiences are signals
of objectification or disrespect or threat.
Even if the treatment June encountered was exactly the same, it seems plausible that her mood
would not spoil in the latter case. Her spoiled mood in Street Harassment is not simply caused
by those interactions. If it were, her mood would change in the same way even if she knew that
none of these people were objectifying, disrespecting, or threatening her. Instead, in Street
Harassment, June’s mood changes in accordance with changes in her beliefs: apprehending the
attitudes that people have toward her as she is making her way to work.
So, even if it were indeed true that moods do not change suddenly, we should
nevertheless think that they are—pretty regularly—belief-responsive. But also moods do, in fact,
change in the complete and immediate way we take to be ideally belief-responsive.
Imagine someone picking up the phone while in a lovely mood and then hearing
devastating news. This person’s emotions will change drastically but so will their mood. It seems
odd to suggest that seconds into receiving the news, this person is still in a good mood. A drastic
change in emotion will frequently be accompanied by a change in mood. Moreover, the mood
changes in response to changes in belief—it is the bad news that spurs this change, not some
other factor.
21
3.4 A direct connection
I have argued that moods are frequently responsive to changes in belief. But I don’t
simply want to show that moods sometimes change after our beliefs change. My point is that
there is—in an important sense—a direct link between changes in these states, that moods are
cognitively penetrable.
In “Towards A Computational Theory of Mood” (2000), Sizer criticizes examples like the
bad news case. She argues that they fail to show a direct connection between changes in belief
and changes in mood. Furthermore, she poses two objections to the very possibility of a belief
directly affecting moods. I will take these objections in turn.
3.4.1 Explanation and cognitive penetrability of mood
Sizer argues that to posit a direct connection, the semantic content of the belief in
question has to explain the global effects of the mood it causes. This echoes Pylyshyn (1999, p.
343)’s assertion that “if a system is cognitively penetrable then the function it computes is
sensitive, in a semantically coherent way, to the organism’s goals and beliefs, that is, it can be
altered in a way that bears some logical relation to what the person knows.” Since moods affect
so much of our functioning—our thoughts, our reasoning processes, our memories, and so on,
8
how could the semantic content of a particular belief explain all these various effects?
This is a pressing worry and a full discussion of it is beyond the scope of this chapter but
I suspect the answer will have to do with what moods actually are. The worry is particularly
pressing if, like Sizer, we think that moods are defined by their effects. On her view, moods are
There is a vast psychological literature on the myriad effects that moods have on mental functioning. I
8
will address some of this literature in the next chapter.
22
biases in our cognitive architecture—different sets of ways to process. Accepting this view
would make it quite difficult to find some logical relation between all these changes and the
content of the relevant belief.
But this does not have to be our view of moods. If moods are something other than their
effects, we do not need the semantic content to explain the effects of moods. We just need it to
explain the moods. Take for example an account on which the way we attend is at least partially
constitutive of what a mood is. We know that moods are closely tied to both passive and active
attention: the things that jump out to us and the things we engage with vary depending on our
mood.
The connection between beliefs and attention seems to be exactly what we need to fulfill
the semantic content requirement. Our beliefs change how we choose to allocate our voluntary
attention and how we passively attend to our situation. Indeed, in discussions about the
possibility of cognitive penetration of perception, it is generally accepted that there are cognitive
effects on attention (Macpherson 2012; Pylyshyn 1999). Some argue that these effects can even
be strong enough to consider the cognitive effects on attention to count as cases of cognitive
penetration of perception (Wu 2017; Stokes 2018). The debate is centered on whether attention’s
effects on perception still have the right relation to the semantic content of the subject’s cognitive
states. This suggests that the belief’s effect on attention is considered to have the proper relation.
What is taken to be unclear is whether that relation survives and is inherited by the relations
between attention and perception.
It is plausible that the types of attention directly affected by beliefs would be the kinds of
attention that are involved in moods. So, on a theory where attention patterns are at least part of
23
what moods are, moods will be explicable by the content of the beliefs that are affecting
attention. Of course, some explanations will be more elaborate than others. Still, that ought not
make us think such explanations do not exist. The mood itself may have wide-ranging disjointed
effects throughout various functional systems. But the puzzle we needed to address was in
showing semantic effects on the mood itself.
Worries about the cognitive penetrability of moods are certainly important to the question
of moods’ belief-responsiveness. What I have provided is one type of account that can deal with
the issue of semantic content of beliefs affecting moods. I haven’t argued for the view—I will do
so in Chapter 3, "Moods are Patterns of Attention"—but I think it should be a source of optimism
that there are possible accounts of moods that pass this benchmark. There are, however, other
benchmarks that we would expect cognitively penetrable states to pass.
3.4.2 Systematicity
Sizer’s second worry has to do with predictability. If moods are cognitively penetrable,
there should be a robust correlation between changes in belief and changes in mood. And,
according to Sizer, the connection between moods and beliefs is just not systematic or reliable
enough to be able to posit a direct connection.
I think the connection is not quite so tenuous. Even if the connection between moods and
our attitudes is not fully reliable, it seems clearly not random. We can and regularly do make
fairly successful predictions about the way people’s moods will change as their beliefs change.
When Jason’s friend says all the things he does, he says them with the expectation of making
Jason’s mood improve! Of course, what beliefs change someone’s mood will frequently vary
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across individuals due to the differences in their other beliefs, habits, desires, and so on. But for a
particular agent, we can observe systematic correlation.
Even between individuals, we can make solid predictions about people’s moods based on
cognitively involved events—having fights with loved ones, being scolded at work, and so on.
Caspi et al. (1987), Lavallee and Campbell (1995), and David et al. (1997) all confirm
correlations between positive social/work events and good moods on one hand and negative
social/work events and negative moods, on the other. These studies do not show that these mood
9
shifts have anything to do with changes in belief. They might have to do with changes in tension
or energy resulting from these interactions. Still, I think it is instructive that certain kinds of
cognitively involved interactions consistently predict moods. It shows a correlation between
moods and the kinds of events we would expect to involve mood-influencing beliefs. All these
reliably predict a specific mood even if they don’t guarantee it.
That said, it’s true that sometimes, even significant changes in our beliefs or desire
satisfaction fail to change our mood. Why some of these changes affect our moods and some
don’t is an interesting puzzle that is worthy of investigation. But this should not make us doubt
the systematic nature of the connection between moods and beliefs. After all, there is an
analogous puzzle with emotions. The same type of comment might make us really angry on one
day but go by without a second thought on another day. This shouldn’t make us think changes in
belief don’t directly affect emotions like anger. What it should make us do is investigate why
moods or emotions respond to changes in beliefs in these disparate ways.
This holds for the evening of the day of the event. Interestingly, DeLongis et al. (1988) indicated that
9
even though negative events make people’s mood more negative the day of the event, their mood tends to
be higher than average the day after.
25
To put it differently, if examples of moods that are resistant to changes in belief
demonstrate a lack of systematic connection, then the connection between emotions and our
cognitive attitudes is also in question.
3.5 Maintaining the orthodox view and small emotions
The last two sections show that a direct connection cannot be dismissed out of hand. That
does not show us yet that we ought to posit it. Why should we prefer a view on which moods
respond to changes of belief directly? Perhaps it is better to stick with the orthodox view that
moods are affected by changes of belief indirectly—via some intermediary.
This intermediary would have to be belief-responsive, affect moods, and, more
specifically, plausibly be at work when moods appear to be responding to changes in belief.
Further, this should be a state that cannot be easily posited to play intermediary between beliefs
and emotions. If the intermediary is there for both moods and emotions, it would not work to
show that moods are less belief-responsive than emotions are.
What should this intermediary be then? One natural candidate that fits all the criteria is:
emotions! By the orthodox hypothesis, they are belief-responsive. Emotions definitely can and
do affect our moods. Emotions are regularly present when our moods change in response to
beliefs. And, moreover, since emotions are the intermediary, we do not have to worry about the
claim that the same intermediary exists between beliefs and emotions! So, perhaps the best way
to hold on to the orthodox view is to say that moods are only indirectly responsive to changes in
belief because they are responsive to emotions and it is emotions that are directly responsive to
changes in belief.
26
If moods are going to respond to changes in belief via emotions, we must ask what kind
of emotions these are. The kinds of cases that come to mind are cases like the bad news case
where horrible news gives rise to grief and a bad mood at the same time or cases of diffusing
emotions like a case where anger at a particular thing settles into a generally irritable mood. The
emotions in these cases are obvious, identifiable—what we might call “big”—emotions.
These kinds of situations, however, are not the most paradigm cases of mood change and
not the types of cases I have been focusing on. The way that I have described my central cases,
Cheer Up and Street Harassment, doesn’t involve big emotions. There’s no burst of joy that
settles into a better mood for Jason. There’s no major annoyance that ushers in frustration for
June. So, if all changes in mood that seem to respond to changes in belief are better described as
changing in response to emotions, these emotions are going to have to be fairly subtle or “small.”
It is certainly true that a more detailed description of the cases I gave involves many
small emotions. But I do not think that this gives us reason to think that it is only the small
emotions that are directly responding to beliefs and not the moods.
What counts as a small emotion here? These cannot be small, general, possibly non-
intentional feelings or small abrupt changes in overall wellbeing. These are the hallmarks of
moods and if it is these feelings that we take to respond to beliefs then this should only convince
us more that moods are directly belief-responsive. In order to maintain the view that moods need
emotions as an intermediary, the small emotions have to be more or less focused, intentional
states—a twinge of annoyance at standing in a slow-moving line, a quick jolt of excitement that
a new episode of a favorite show is up. Sure enough, these are frequently connected to particular
beliefs and it seems possible for these bumps and jolts to nudge our moods this way or that.
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The problem is that these small emotions are bad predictors of mood changes. Quite
possibly, it is moods’ resilience to small emotions that makes people think that moods do not
respond to changes in belief. I may have a number of small joys throughout the day and yet
remain in a foul mood, especially if things are not generally going well for me. Still, at a
different time, a relatively small joy may make a big difference in mood. If the difference
between a small joy affecting mood only a little and a small joy affecting mood a lot is the
content of the changed belief, then we are better off positing a direct connection between
changes in belief and changes in mood than going through any intermediary. This is the kind of
thing that I envision to be happening in cases like Cheer Up and Street Harassment.
Ultimately, the problem with the view that it is the emotions, rather than the moods, that
are belief-responsive is not just that it mischaracterizes moods. It also mischaracterizes the nature
of emotions.
3.6 Emotions aren’t that smart
The traditional view rests on the assumption that emotions connect to beliefs in some
special way, somehow insulated from arational factors. But this is simply not the case. Emotions
can frequently fail to change despite changes in belief. Even the clearest cases of judgment-
sensitive emotions can be influenced and shaped by arational factors. Because the object of
emotions is more specific than that of moods, the rate at which emotions respond to beliefs may
well be higher than the rate at which moods do. That said, we should be careful not to
overestimate this gap.
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Just like not all changes in our evaluative beliefs cause a predictable change in mood, not
all changes in such beliefs cause a predictable change in emotion. Of course, there are the
dramatic cases of recalcitrant emotions like a fear of flying that persists despite the belief that
flying is quite safe. But there are many smaller cases as well. Forming the belief that someone
insulted them usually makes people angry. But not always. Sometimes they take the insult on the
chin and accept it without getting worked up.
Like moods, most emotions have some non-rationalizing causes. Hunger can cause
emotions as well as moods. A remark that would at any other time pass by without any emotional
reaction may suddenly inspire anger all because you haven’t eaten in a while. Here, the arational
factors are doing most of the work. Now, take an example where you are hungry and someone
outright insults you. An outburst of anger may well be caused by the justified belief that you
were insulted but the shape of your anger, its length and intensity will likely also be affected by
your hunger. To write off the effects of the hunger is to mischaracterize this emotion, since it is
responding to both beliefs and arational factors alike. Raskolnikov’s guilt in Dostoevsky’s Crime
and Punishment, extremely justified as it was, may not have tortured him quite so much if he had
been in better health, less stressed out, or could have managed to sleep better. The fact that
arational factors affect our emotions does not make them not responsive to beliefs but it does
show moods and emotions to operate in the same way.
Indeed, we do regularly attempt to externally control our emotions in the same way that
we control our moods. Are you feeling upset at someone? Perhaps you should take some deep
breaths. Or do some exercise. Or listen to a happy song. All of these can cause your sadness over
some disappointment to recede. All of these are exactly like Cyrus doing stretches in Anxious.
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This is all to say that just as a massage, a walk, or a forced smile can cause a better mood,
so can they get rid of anger or sadness about a particular incident. Once we see these parallels,
we can open ourselves up to the idea that the connection between moods and beliefs on the one
hand and emotions and beliefs on the other is not so different after all.
Of course, we can re-describe the cases above in a way that has arational factors
changing the person’s beliefs and those beliefs causing the emotion. Perhaps the happy song
causes me to reconsider whether the disappointment was really so disappointing and the change
in beliefs alters my sadness. This would preserve a special relationship between beliefs and
emotions. I am, however, quite suspicious of such re-descriptions.
The thing is that we have emotions that change without any apparent changes in belief at
all. Many emotions simply expire. I can be angry at someone for some minor transgression, go
for a run, and stop being angry about it without any change in the belief that it was a
transgression. Another good example is grief. When we grieve a loss, the reason for our grief is
the loss of a person who is no longer here. Experiencing grief is an intense and time-consuming
process but it does not last forever. In a matter of weeks or months, we get back into a normal
rhythm of life. But the reasons for our grief and our beliefs about them don’t apparently go away.
The person is still gone—our life is still missing them.
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More importantly, if we take on this kind of re-description, we can re-describe our moods
in the same way. On this picture, various irrational factors cause us to make judgments like “so
and so is being rude” and “this and such is going poorly” and it is those judgments together that
cause a bad mood. I don’t find this view particularly compelling. I think this view has more
For some discussion of the complications in determining the rationality of grief, see Gustafson (1989),
10
Price (2010), Wilkinson (2000), Cholbi (2017), and Marušić (2018).
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difficulty explaining how moods and emotions can be recalcitrant in the face of changes of belief
than the view that rational and arational factors both affect moods and emotions directly.
Even if we don’t want to embrace it, the possibility of this view with respect to moods
shows us that we cannot use it to get a special connection between beliefs and emotions that does
not hold for beliefs and moods. So, it seems like both moods and emotions can respond to beliefs
quickly and both can respond to beliefs slowly. Both can respond to beliefs or fail to respond to
beliefs and, crucially, both can change due to arational factors.
4. Appropriateness of moods and emotions
4.1 Appropriate/inappropriate moods
Now, I’d like to move on to the discussion of appropriateness. It is another hallmark of
the connection between emotions and beliefs that emotions can be evaluated for something like
appropriateness, fittingness, aptness, or another similar criterion. When Kalau gets angry at
Francesca’s remark, it makes sense to ask if his anger is an appropriate reaction.
It seems to me that there is a relationship between states being responsive to changes in
belief and being evaluable for appropriateness. Being belief-responsive automatically opens a
state up to certain kinds of appropriateness evaluations. That said, the question of moods being
evaluable in this way has received some separate attention and so, for now, I would like to
discuss this as a separate issue.
Deonna and Teroni (2009, p. 361) feel particularly pessimistic about the prospect of
evaluating the appropriateness of moods when they say: “While the idea that emotions are
appropriate or not makes perfect sense…, it doesn’t make sense to think of moods as appropriate
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or not.” This is a pretty strong indictment but I think we find that moods can be evaluated in this
way.
There are a number of possible appropriateness or fittingness relations that we could be
talking about here. D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) popularized one such notion—that emotions are
fitting insofar as they correctly present their objects as having some evaluative properties.
Mitchell (2019) has a thoughtful discussion about whether moods can be appropriate in the
D’Arms and Jacobson sense but this is not the only notion that concerns me here. The issue is
that this notion of appropriateness is strongly tied to a state’s content and what it represents.
While it strikes me as very likely that moods sometimes have specifiable contents and do
represent things in the world in certain ways, there is a lot of debate about whether or how this is
the case. My goal here is not to defend a particular stance in this debate but show that moods
being evaluable as appropriate or inappropriate in some meaningful senses ought to be common
ground in theorizing about mood.
Moods and emotions are regularly evaluable for appropriateness in a number of different
ways. For example, we can evaluate whether it is intelligible to experience this mood or emotion
given the circumstances, whether the mood or emotion is congruent with the agent’s beliefs,
whether it is caused by rationally formed beliefs, and so on.
Consider the following two cases:
Health worries: Asha has gotten a medical exam because her doctor suspects she
might have a serious illness. Asha won’t know the results for a couple of days.
Even when she can take her mind off the test, she remains in an anxious mood in
the following days.
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Promotion: Sanaa gets promoted for doing very good work. Her boss is delighted
with her. Getting a promotion is what she wanted but after the news, she finds
herself in a frustrated mood.
There is an intuitive difference between Asha and Sanaa. It seems perfectly intelligible for Asha
to be anxious—she has good reason to be. But with Sanaa, we are left wondering: is there more
to the story? Why would she be in a frustrated mood? This is a sign that, absent some vindicating
details, Sanaa’s mood is inappropriate.
There are many possible senses in which Sanaa’s mood could be inappropriate,
depending on the details of what’s going on. If moods have contents, the content of a frustrated
mood may be something like “[my] desires have been disappointed,” “[I’m] in an inhospitable
environment,” or perhaps the mood represents Sanaa’s world in an inhospitable way. In this case,
we can say her mood is unfitting in the sense of incorrectly portraying the world. But even if the
frustrated mood doesn’t have content, we can judge moods as appropriate or inappropriate to
particular environments or states of desire-satisfaction. And, indeed, it does not seem intelligible
to be in a frustrated mood when one is in a particularly favorable environment or one’s desires
are well-satisfied.
Moreover, we can judge the appropriateness of Sanaa’s mood on whether it is congruent
with her beliefs. Even though we are all aware of our moods being in part determined by
arational factors, we generally expect our moods to be tracking our beliefs. Imagine that Sanaa
thinks that things are going very well for her and it is a great thing for her to get the promotion.
Still, the promotion put her in a frustrated mood. This kind of change is not an uncommon
experience for people undergoing extreme modulations in their hormones but it is very jarring
and can be described internally as moods being “all wrong” or “changing for no reason.” It is
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quite right to call such a mood inappropriate and that reveals that we expect our moods to be
overall belief-congruent.
Additionally, we can also judge belief-responsive moods based on whether the belief that
caused the mood change was rationally formed. Suppose that when Sanaa was promoted, she
unreasonably formed a belief that the promotion is part of a ploy to humiliate her and that is the
belief that caused her to be in a frustrated mood. In response, we might tell her: “Stop being
grumpy. No one is out to get you. They’re just really excited about the great work you’ve been
doing.” Although Sanaa’s mood was responding appropriately to her change in belief, we might
see her mood as inheriting the irrationality of the belief that caused it.
Asha’s anxiety, on the other hand, strikes us as appropriate. If anxiety has content it is
something like “[my] situation is precarious,” “the satisfaction of [my] desires is highly
uncertain,” and if it represents, it represents the world in some menacing way. Each of those
would be fitting. Asha’s situation is precarious and uncertain. It is intelligible to be anxious when
things are uncertain. Given that she believes she might have a serious disease, her mood is belief-
congruent and because she formed the belief based on the claims of her doctor, we can also say
that her belief-responsive mood inherits the rationality of the belief that caused it.
We can see that there are many different interesting senses of appropriateness that moods
can be judged on. So far, however, I have focused on moods that are belief-responsive. What
about the moods that change based on something else, something arational?
Let us think back again to Sanaa’s belief-incongruent frustrated mood. Not only do we
have a rational factor failing to affect Sanaa’s mood, we also have some arational factors causing
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her to feel a very different mood. This may lead us to think that any mood caused by arational
factors would be inappropriate or, at least, would fail to be evaluable for appropriateness.
Of course, in such cases, we cannot evaluate moods based on the rationality of the belief
that caused it. By stipulation, there is no such belief. Nevertheless, all the other senses of
appropriateness are still applicable. It would be sad if it were the case that raising your mood
through exercise always meant that you were in an inappropriately good mood. Just as exercise
might cause us to transition from one appropriate mood to another, it may cause us to transition
from an appropriate mood to an inappropriate one, from an inappropriate mood to an appropriate
one, or even, perhaps, from one inappropriate mood to another. What matters is whether the
resultant mood stands in the proper relation to the world or to the agent’s beliefs, depending on
which notion of appropriateness we care about.
Perhaps, these kinds of cases of non-belief-responsive moods are a reason to consider
some moods not to be evaluable for appropriateness. Though this is not my preferred view, I am
willing to concede the point as long as we recognize that this means that analogous cases of
emotions will also fail to be evaluable for appropriateness. After all, just as one’s mood may be
raised by an upbeat dance, so can one’s anger at someone go away. And this can happen
independent of whether the original anger was appropriate. So, whatever we say about these
more difficult cases, it should not undermine the idea that moods and emotions are evaluable for
appropriateness in the same ways.
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4.2 Two sources of skepticism for the appropriateness of moods
4.2.1 The range of appropriate moods
One might have a more general worry about evaluating moods for appropriateness, even
the ones that respond to changes in belief. I have talked about the intelligibility of moods and
their belief-congruence but there are cases where it can seem like any mood counts as intelligible
or congruent. Think back to Jason’s situation in the Cheer Up case. He had had a lousy day
because a number of things went wrong and he was in a dejected mood. Yet, if he had not been in
a bad mood, if his mood was neutral or vaguely optimistic—“I’m sure things will turn around
soon”—we would not say his mood was inappropriate. We might even commend him for looking
on the bright side! But, of course, we wouldn’t say his bad mood in the original case was
inappropriate either! It makes sense to be in a bad mood when things go wrong. So, it’s ok for
Jason to be in a good mood and ok for Jason to be in a bad mood. If anything goes, what are we
evaluating when we say the state is appropriate?
First off, I do think there are inappropriate moods in this case. Given the lightness of the
annoyances that have bothered Jason, it is, for example, inappropriate for Jason to feel despair. It
is also likely inappropriate for Jason to be overwhelmingly cheerful. Speaking more generally,
typical days consist of a great number of small joys and small annoyances. So, what moods are
appropriate for an average day? There is quite a wide range.
What the range is depends on the person’s circumstances, how they see their position in
the world, and what they care about.
For someone who lives in a relatively stable and equitable political and economic system,
has some deep human relationships, and finds some level of purpose in their life—it is
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appropriate to be anywhere from a somewhat bad mood to a wide range of good moods. Just
because it is appropriate to be in some sort of good mood does not have to mean that it is
inappropriate to be in any bad mood. As regular events happen throughout the day, it is
appropriate to transition from one mood in this range to another. On such a day it is inappropriate
to be in any number of extremely bad moods: extreme anxiety, desperation, and so on.
On the other hand, for someone whose average day involves being surrounded by
suffering, unpredictability, living in significant insecurity such as political or economic unrest or
inequity, experiencing ongoing health problems, loneliness, or lack of purpose, the range of
appropriate moods will be different but still wide. In such circumstances it may well be
appropriate for an average day to hold despair but also many other moods, including some good
ones. The inappropriate moods, however, will include a wider range of good moods, possibly
11
including serene and other relaxed moods. In truth, this is part of the tragedy of continuously
living in difficult circumstances, as an oppressed member of society, or as a caring member of a
world that contains widespread suffering. Not only does it make it more difficult to have good
moods but it makes frustrated and anxious moods almost always appropriate and a range of good
Studies like Diener and Diener (1996), and Diener et al. (2015) give us some reason to think that the
11
most common mood, the one most people default to even when they live in some form of hardship, is a
mildly positive one. Ben-Ze’ev (2017) argues this is one of the important mechanisms for cultivating
enduring happiness. If this is the case, then it might be an interesting question to ask whether most
average situations include a mildly positive mood as an appropriate option. Of course, just because we
tend to default to this mood doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to do so. On the other hand, I suspect that the
appropriateness of a mood has in part to do with what our expectations are: if our expectations are met or
exceeded, better moods are appropriate. Almost by definition, an average day is one where our basic
expectations are met: nothing dramatically upsets our day in either direction. So, it seems plausible to
suppose that having an average day makes being in a mildly positive mood appropriate. If that’s right, we
could explain why even the good moods of those people who live in fairly difficult circumstances are
appropriate. This is not to say that just any average day would make a positive mood appropriate. An
average day of living in the trenches during World War I would probably not make even a mildly positive
mood appropriate, no matter the degree to which the day meets one’s expectations.
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moods inappropriate. Even so, no matter what the range actually is, an average day will involve a
large range of appropriate moods.
The fact that there is a wide range of appropriate moods in some cases should not put us
off from evaluating them. We can see this even more clearly when we acknowledge that in cases
of emotion, there are also frequently multiple appropriate reactions. There is a wide range of
emotions that are appropriate when faced with a loss. In grief it is perfectly appropriate to
experience sadness, anger, or numbness. It is common wisdom that people grieve in many
different ways.
The list of situations in which many different emotions are appropriate is not limited to
cases of extreme emotion. If someone makes a cringe-worthy pun, it is appropriate to feel
amused and appropriate to feel annoyed at it. If you like making puns a lot, it may even be
appropriate to feel envious. Were we to focus on cases like this when judging whether emotions
are assessable as appropriate or inappropriate, it may also be somewhat surprising that emotions
are evaluable for appropriateness. Whatever way we spell out the notion of appropriateness that
belongs here, it is not one that maps a particular situation to one particular appropriate reaction.
What all of this allows us to see is that both moods and emotions have cases where the
range of appropriate reactions is quite broad. This means that as long as those cases do not make
us hesitate in saying that emotions are evaluable for appropriateness, it should also not make us
hesitate in saying that moods are.
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4.2.2 The frequency of evaluating moods for appropriateness
There remains a puzzle about the appropriateness of moods. Recall how nonsensical this
position seemed to Deonna and Teroni. It is undeniably true that though we may sometimes
criticize people for their moods—“Stop being so grumpy, everything is fine!”—it is much more
common for us to criticize other people’s emotions. Similarly, it is much more common for us to
question the appropriateness of our own emotions than the appropriateness of our moods. And
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if both moods and emotions can be evaluated for appropriateness, there needs to be an
explanation for this asymmetry.
I think the answer has to do with two of the core features that set moods apart from
emotions: globality and intentionality.
The fact that moods are global, that they color the way we see so much of what we
encounter, can make it difficult to even identify our own mood. It can be hard to tell from the
inside of your own experience whether people around you are being extra rude today or if you’re
simply in an irritable mood. You may go on thinking your mood is fine even though, from a
third-person perspective, it would be clear that it is not. And it is difficult to assess your mood for
appropriateness when a lot of the time you don’t even notice your mood.
Even if we do recognize what mood we are in, moods so thoroughly affect our
perspective that it can make it very difficult to identify inappropriate moods. Consider an
example of inappropriate anxiety, a free-floating kind of anxious buzz. In this stressful world,
anxiety is often appropriate and it takes experience combined with significant introspection to
Thank you to an anonymous referee for this extremely helpful observation.
12
39
recognize free-floating anxiety, to see that it’s not actually a sign of an unsafe environment but
an inappropriate mood.
Emotions, on the other hand, are more local. The object of our emotions will be affected
by our attitude but much of the world will not. This makes it easier to gain perspective on our
emotions and assess whether they are appropriate or inappropriate.
Relatedly, the very fact that emotions have a pretty focused, easily recognizable object
and moods do not will probably mean that the range of appropriate emotions will, in general, be
smaller than the range of appropriate moods. And, furthermore, emotions will have fewer factors
that can affect their appropriateness. After all, what is relevant to the appropriateness of an
emotion has to do with facts about the agent and facts about the object of the emotion. But the
things relevant to the appropriateness of a mood are much broader—they include facts about all
sorts of things in the agent and out in the world. This generality of moods makes assessing
moods for appropriateness a much more laborious task than trying to assess emotions.
This also makes it more risky to try and evaluate someone else’s mood. We don’t expect
to be familiar with all the ups and downs of someone else’s day, much less the details of all their
beliefs and desires. Our lack of access to the relevant facts puts us in a bad position to assess
whether their mood is in the appropriate range and therefore in a worse position to criticize.
So, it is not the case that moods are less apt for evaluation of appropriateness than
emotions are: they are just more difficult to judge.
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5. Conclusion
What I have tried to show throughout this discussion is that moods and emotions tend to
interact with beliefs in a very similar way. There are a couple of lessons to be drawn from this.
First, it puts us in a position to reject any theory of moods which relies on moods being
disconnected from beliefs. Indeed, any acceptable view of moods will have to be able to account
for the connection between moods and beliefs. In chapter 3, I will try to present just this kind of
view.
Second, it should make us consider a unified theory for why moods and emotions would
have this very similar connection. Of course it is possible that there would be two different kinds
of mechanisms involved: one underlying the connection between beliefs and moods and the
other underlying the connection between beliefs and emotions. Nevertheless, even if emotions
have a connection to beliefs that is over and above the one that moods do, we still need to
explain the similarities.
This will be the last detailed discussion of emotions in this dissertation, but I think it is
important to consider what this might mean in light of the view I will argue for in chapter 3.
There, I will argue that moods are constituted by patterns of attention and that this explains how
moods are connected to beliefs. If I am right, then it could provide reason for us to include
patterns of attention or, at least, an explicitly attentional element as part of our analysis of
emotions as well.
In this way, accepting the relationship between cognitive factors and moods will help us
not only develop better theories of what moods are but also help us learn about the nature of
emotions.
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CHAPTER 2
THE TYRANNY OF GOOD MOOD AND WHY ATTENTION IS WHAT IT'S
ALL ABOUT
1. Introduction
Whether among philosophers, psychologists, or the academic or public sphere more
generally, there has been a deep undercurrent of seeing the value of moods in a particular way.
Good moods are overwhelmingly beneficial not just because of how they feel but because of
their effects. They have motivational benefits. Good moods make us do the right thing more
often than bad moods do and they make us act in accordance with our moral beliefs. They also
have epistemic and prudential benefits. Good moods generally help us perceive the world more
accurately and even when they don't, they dispose us to think and act in ways that make
achieving our goals more likely. These theoretical commitments have a practical corollary that—
to the extent that it is in our power—we should always be promoting good moods in ourselves
and others. I will refer to this set of views as the Good Moods are Best (GMB) framework
This paper aims to show that despite its pervasiveness, the GMB framework must be
usurped. It has two major flaws. For one, it oversimplifies the range of moods. They do not
simply exist on a one-dimensional scale from moods that feel bad—bad moods—to moods that
feel good—good moods —but, rather, are complex multidimensional states. Each of these other
13
dimensions also bears on the motivational, epistemic and prudential effects of the mood in
question. Moreover, even if we only look at good moods and bad moods, the claims of the
predominant framework about the effects of these moods prove to be false.
I take this usage of "good mood" and "bad mood" to track everyday usage. It also tracks the way that
13
most psychologists distinguish good and bad moods—as positive and negative undirected affect
respectively.
42
Once we see this, however, we are faced with several important questions: what is it
about moods that makes some of them have the features that are so important to us? Why do
some moods make moral behavior easier? Why do some make us see the world more accurately?
Why do some moods help us achieve our goals more than others?
The answer, I will argue, is attention. Moods have an important close relationship to the
way we pay attention to things, the things that grab our attention, and the way our attention
moves from one thing to another. I will argue that both the evidence that supports the
predominant view and the evidence that speaks against it can be explained by differences in
attention. Ultimately, whether moods help us out morally, epistemically, or prudentially relies on
how they move our attention. This, in turn not only provides a satisfying explanation of key
features of moods, but also shows us what our duties might be with respect to our moods and the
moods of others. Rather than promoting particular moods, it is our duty to do our best to attend
well.
I will proceed in three stages. First, I will lay out the predominant framework that good
moods are better than bad moods independent of how they feel. Then, I will demonstrate the
complex and multidimensional nature of moods to argue that this view is incorrect. Finally, I will
turn to the topic of attention. Here, I will explain how patterns of attending in particular ways
explain the available data about mood effects on so many of the things we care about.
2. The Dominance of Good Moods
The importance of good moods has dominated our culture for a long time. We can see it
most clearly in the general mainstream culture but this framework has also found a place within
43
more limited spaces of clinical psychology and academia. In this section, I will lay out three key
ways in which good moods have been argued to make us better agents: via making us better
moral agents, via making us more accurate, and via making us more successful at reaching our
goals. I will address these in turn.
2.1 Doing The Right Thing
Moods play a significant role in philosophical debates about the nature of motivation.
Some of these debates have to do with the the relationship between motivation and certain
mental states—especially, judgments—while others have to do with the types of actions we
perform.
Within the former category, moods have been brought up in relation to two positions:
motivational judgment internalism—the view that anyone who makes a sincere moral judgment
will be at least somewhat moved to act on it—and the guise of the good—the view that we can
only intentionally perform actions that we believe to be good under some description. To argue
that these views are false, authors like Velleman (1992) and Stocker (1979) have proposed
various versions of cases intended to convince the reader that some very low moods—despair,
despondency—can make people entirely unmotivated by their evaluative judgments or not to see
anything good about their chosen course of action. If they are correct, then these cases are
counterexamples to motivational judgment internalism and the guise of the good thesis. In
response to these kinds of cases, Michael Smith (1995) writes in The Moral Problem:
[I]f either of these is possible, the agents in question are not rational evaluators.
They are depressives or compulsives or whatever whose depression or
44
compulsion has caused them, irrationally, to desire other than what they think they
have normative reason to do (138).
Here, Smith argues that depression affecting motivation can make us irrational. This suggests
14
that rational agents cannot be in a depressed mood or at least cannot be influenced by their
depressed mood in their desires. Whether we see the depressed person’s failure as one of
rationality or not, one walks away with the sense that moods divide into two categories: defective
moods and not defective moods.
We get a similar impression—that better moods are better for us as moral agents—from
work discussing virtue and character. This is the second area of philosophy that has discussed the
effects of mood on motivation.
Suppose you decide to do some shopping. You head to the mall where two people
approach you and ask you if you can take a survey about the air quality at the mall. One of them
drops a pen. Do you pick it up for them? Well, according to Baron (1997), this depends in some
part on whether you’re outside a Cinnabon or a clothing store. Pleasant smells of the Cinnabon
make it more likely that you’ll pick up the pen than the neutral smell of the clothing store.
Guéguen (2012) showed that when in the presence of a pleasant odor, we don't even need to be
asked to help. People in pleasant-smelling places are likely to spontaneously jump in to help
someone. The smell primes helping behavior. These kinds of effects—where a seemingly
irrelevant priming factor has a significant effect on how people behave—are so pervasive, that
they have been used (Doris, 2002) to challenge key assumptions of virtue ethics about persistent
I think it is particularly confusing that Smith uses the term “depression” here. His thesis sounds more
14
plausible if we think of depression as the mental illness. However, the counterexamples presented by
Velleman and Stocker explicitly concern moods rather than clinical depression.
45
character traits. After all, if such irrelevant factors play a significant role in whether we act,
15
then how can we attribute those behaviors to a person's character rather than simply their
circumstances?
These effects on behavior are not typically considered to be direct effects of the
environment on behavior. Instead, nice smells, room temperature, lighting, etc. improve our
mood and moods affect behavior. One of the most cited early experiments of this sort by Isen and
Levin (1972)—a study that aimed to show that finding a dime in the coin slot return improved
helping behavior—is titled "Effect of Feeling Good on Helping." The role of mood is
16
presumed. These experiments and those that followed them were specifically designed to see
whether a small bump in mood could have behavior effects. Doris (2002), in critiquing the
existence of character, also takes the priming effects to be effects on mood.
Moreover, these studies seem to show that a better mood means more helping. And we
can see evidence for this in Baron's (1997) pleasant smell study. The associates not only asked
participants to fill out an air quality survey and checked whether they would perform a minor
helping task. They also asked participants to rate their moods and those in pleasant-smelling
areas consistently rated their mood higher than those in neutrally-smelling areas. We get further
17
confirmation of good mood's effects on helping from studies that do not involve any priming at
In demonstrating this point, many cite studies like Isen and Levin (1972) which have encountered some
15
difficulties during attempts to replicate the results. However, there is ample evidence from other studies
that it is, indeed, the case that irrelevant factors seem to have significant effects on helping behavior. See
Miller (2009) for a review of studies supporting this point.
See footnote 15 above about the replicability of this particular study.
16
The investigators varied the order of tasks during the study and found that it didn't matter whether the
17
helping task, the air survey, or the mood questionnaire came first.
46
all. Zolotoy et al (2021), for example, demonstrated that companies where the headquarters
employees are in better moods tend to be those that engage in more philanthropic giving.
These two lines of philosophical debate—Michael Smith's argument that some bad
moods make us irrational and the situationist argument that jolts of good mood promote helping
—suggest that good moods are better than bad moods independent of how these moods feel.
They also help us do better morally—perform better actions and more actions that align with our
judgments of value.
18
On the flip side, bad moods are bad, independent of how they feel—they make us do
morally worse. Of course, we may allow that sometimes bad moods are inevitable and, in a
certain sense, justified. If a loved one is in a devastating accident, not only may it be impossible
to stay in a good mood but, moreover, the mood seems justified because it reflects the care for
that loved one. We can understand this mood but still find the sufferer somehow compromised in
a way they wouldn’t be in a better mood.
2.2 Getting it Right
Another piece of the GMB framework lurks in the relationship that people take to hold
between their moods and the accuracy of their beliefs.
Many are familiar with the concept of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). It is a type
of psychotherapy used for a number of mood issues at various levels of severity—both clinical
and not. The basis of this type of therapy is the belief—originally formulated by Aaron T. Beck
When we discuss moods' effects on acting in accordance with judgments of value it is also important to
18
to note that moods also affect the judgments we make. As section 2.2 demonstrates, the dominant GMB
framework also commits us to the view that the judgments we make in good moods are more accurate
than those we make in bad moods.
47
(1967, 1987)—that depression intimately involves misrepresenting the world—involves forming
false beliefs and reasoning poorly. In CBT, the patient works with the therapist to identify these
thought distortions, recognize why they are distortions, and build habits that help see the world
in a more accurate way (Beck et al., 1979).
CBT is widely recognized as a successful treatment method for many different disorders
including depression but also for low mood more generally. To many people this serves to
reinforce the thought that good moods are categorically epistemically better than bad moods.
This doesn't have to mean that all good moods are epistemically better than all bad moods. Some
good moods are surely epistemically undesirable. They could come with extreme
overconfidence, carelessness, and so on. A mild bad mood may well be epistemically preferable
to one of those intense good moods. Still, the underlying thought is that being depressed must
mean that there is something wrong going on epistemically.
Indeed, there are a number of beliefs and thought processes associated with depressed
mood that may skew people’s perception of the world. Depressed people can get stuck in all-or-
nothing thinking, may discount good things that happen and only focus on the bad, and so on.
Even when it comes to judging matters of fact that don’t pertain to their mental state, it seems
there are things individuals in bad moods systematically misjudge. For example, Ambady and
Gray (2002) showed that people in sad moods were less accurate at judging teaching
effectiveness or the relationship between people from small amounts of evidence.
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2.3 Getting What We Want
Mood effects on judgments are not limited to accuracy. We are prone to make mood-
congruent judgments—good moods mean evaluating things more positively and bad moods
mean evaluating things more negatively (Clore and Huntsinger, 2007). This suggests that
whether good or bad, moods bias us in particular directions.
Even when we are not that concerned about getting things right, good moods are also
frequently touted as the path to prudential rationality. The idea that thinking positive thoughts
will help us reach our goals has come to surround us from every corner of popular culture and is
a major part of the GMB framework. From self-help gurus to renowned psychologists, many
people emphasize the connection between positivity, positive moods, and positive thoughts on
the one hand and achievement, success, and health on the other.
That means that even when we see evidence that positive moods may not be
epistemically preferable to bad moods (we will examine evidence to this effect in the following
section), there is a ready made response for the defender of good moods. Even if being in good
moods involves deluding ourselves a bit, it is a delusion necessary to help us not be demoralized
in the face of hardship, achieve our goals, be healthier, and so on.
Researchers in the field of positive psychology work to figure out how to promote
meaning, flow, and positive moods but frameworks along these lines are particularly widespread
outside of academia. From more reputable sources like the Mayo Clinic or WebMD to self-help
gurus the world over, positive thinking is promoted with varying levels of caveats. At the
extreme end are popular books like Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 book The Power of Positive
Thinking (2003) or Rhonda Byrne's The Secret (2006). These books claim that positive thoughts
49
will simply manifest themselves in good things happening to you—they will alter the fabric of
the universe to make good things happen. Negative thoughts will do the opposite. They will
change the world in a way that brings you misfortune. While these have both received their share
of negative reviews, The Power of Positive Thinking sold 15 million copies. The Secret sold 30
million. The idea that positivity will get you where you want to be is undeniably mainstream.
19
2.4 Mood Norms
So far we have looked at three ways in which various bits of culture, scholarship, and
medical approaches push us toward embracing the unequivocal superiority of good moods over
bad moods. First, we see good moods portrayed as making us more easily moved by our moral
judgments and, more generally, more easily moved to do morally good, altruistic things. Second,
we see bad moods portrayed as necessarily distorting our view of reality. Third, we see good
moods—even when they bias our perception of reality—portrayed as conducive to getting what
we want. And, on top of all that, good moods just feel better than bad moods.
Armed with this outlook, we can hardly avoid the conclusion that we ought to maximize
good moods: in ourselves and others we should strive for good cheer. Of course, our moods are
not exactly up to us. We cannot just decide to be in a particular mood. Still, there are a lot of
things we can do to affect mood. As the priming studies show, there are many minor things that
companies, governing bodies, and others can do to scoot people's moods in a particular direction.
We can influence people's moods with our words and actions and we can influence our own
Although plagued wth its own problems, Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How the Relentless
19
Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (2010) is a popular text that critiques the
pervasive positive thinking culture in the US and discusses some of key manifestations of this trend.
50
moods through all these methods, in addition to also redirecting our attention and changing our
thoughts.
So, if the GMB framework is correct, if we value pleasure over displeasure, moral actions
over immoral ones, behavior that is in line with our judgments over that which is contrary to it,
the promotion of our goals over their disappointment, we should do our best to always avoid bad
moods in ourselves and others.
However, we need not embrace this conclusion because the predominant framework is, in
fact, wrong. This doesn't mean that good moods are bad or are to be avoided. Things are just
more complicated than the framework would lead us to believe.
3. In Praise of Bad Moods
Moods are complex states. And their effects are also complex. An oversimplified
framework that takes good moods to be preferable to bad moods in every respect overlooks two
particularly important features of mood. The first is that it portrays moods as existing in one
dimension—moods are relevant to motivation, or beliefs, or our goals only insofar as they exist
on the spectrum with bad moods on one side and good moods on the other. The second is that
even in the realm of good/bad moods, this common picture oversimplifies the effects of moods.
I will take these in turn.
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3.1 The Many Dimensions of Mood
It can be very easy to think of moods ranging from very bad to very good. After all, for
every mood, we can ask ourselves: does it feel good or bad? And, indeed, in daily life, we
frequently don't bother with discussing moods with more nuance.
But that is not the only dimension along which moods actually exist. There are frustrated
grumpy moods, content moods, bored moods, contemplative moods, nervous moods, joyful
moods, dejected moods, playful moods, and spiteful moods. The list goes on and on. Moreover,
it is not the case that I just listed some specific good and specific bad moods. Playful moods can
be good or bad. So can contemplative, nervous, bored, or spiteful moods. While serene and
joyful moods may feel good, they have different flavors to them. Moods do not exist in black and
white; they exist in full color.
We can see the multifaceted nature of moods and their effects on motivation when we
examine moods' nuanced connection to desires.
The English language itself reflects this connection. Consider asking a sad friend to go
20
out dancing and they respond: "I'm not in the mood to dance." Or else imagine making plans
with a friend and them telling you excitedly: "I'm in the mood for an adventure." This "moods-
to" construction does not necessarily mean that there is such a thing as a dancing mood or an
adventuring mood. Eric Lormand's seminal 1985 article, "Toward a Theory of Moods," addresses
this grammatical construction. He argues that sentences of the form "S is in the mood
to____" (386) are desires. What it means to be in the mood for something is simply to feel like
doing that thing. For Lormand, these desires are not actually connected to moods at all but I
This is also the case for the Russian language and, possibly, other languages as well. But I don't know
20
what those are and suspect that it doesn't emerge everywhere.
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think this is not quite right. Lormand is correct that moods-to statements express desires and he
is right that some moods-to statements don't have a connection to particular moods. While I
might say I am in the mood to drink beer, I think it might be stretching even the most expansive
definitions of mood to say that there exists a beer-drinking mood. But many moods-to are not
like this.
In fact, it is constitutive of some moods to manifest or increase our desires for certain
things—to put us in the mood to do certain things. Think of playful or sulking moods. These are
paradigmatic cases of mood. Furthermore, it is a constitutive feature of a playful mood that you
behave in a playful manner or at least desire to do so. If someone tells me that they're in a playful
mood but they are not playful with their behavior or their words, I am entitled to be confused—to
think the person is particularly strange or that they don't actually know what a playful mood is.
Similarly, it is a constitutive feature of being in a sulky mood that one is motivated to sulk. A
sulky mood isn’t just an upset, irritable mood. It’s a mood where you actively lean into being
difficult and wallow. If you tell me you’re in a sulky mood but are actively trying to cheer up,
I’m going to have to assume that you were mistaken about your mood or that you were in a sulky
mood earlier but are no longer in one.
Even when a certain desire or motivation is not constitutive of a mood, there are still
motivations that are generally associated with certain kinds of moods and are expressed as
moods-to. Think back to the examples I gave at the beginning of the section. Wanting to dance is
not a behavior that is constitutive of any particular mood, but it is indicative of a group of joyful
moods. People who are not in joyful moods can still be motivated to dance for various reasons—
propriety, exercise, or to cheer up—but the spontaneous desire to dance is associated with
53
particular moods. Similarly, being in the mood for an adventure is indicative of a particular
group of restless moods. Someone who is not restless may well still be motivated to pursue an
adventure—perhaps a wizard and some dwarves showed up to his house the night before,
promising treasure—but the desire for adventure is associated with certain moods more than
others. This is exactly why “in the mood for beer” doesn’t seem mood-related. There is no
specific mood that is related to wanting to drink beer—depending on the person, that can point to
anywhere from no moods at all, to all moods.
Moods, therefore, are associated with a number of very different kinds of desires and
motivations. This also goes for desires for things of moral value/disvalue or actions that exhibit
moral virtue/vice. One tends to act more patiently with others in a serene mood than when one
21
is in an anxious mood. On the other hand, in an anxious mood we may be more careful weighing
important moral decisions than we would be in a cheerful mood which may make us more rash.
An adventurous mood can make us act more bravely. A playful mood can make us act more
callously.
This extends to how much we feel motivated to do the things we believe we ought to do.
For one, what we think we have most reason to do will vary with our mood. Moreover, even
when our judgments stay the same, how much they move us changes. The judgments “It is best
not to risk things” or “discussing the issue is the right thing to do” will affect our motivation
differently depending on whether our mood makes risk seem more or less appealing, whether it
makes compromising more or less easy.
As Bommarito argues in Inner Virtue (2017), our mental states themselves can be more or less virtuous
21
but I want to highlight that the motivation that comes from these moods does spill out into our actions.
54
We can also already see how much this complicates the relationship between moods and
the promotion of our goals. As we have seen, moods play a role in changing and shaping our
desires and, therefore, our goals with them. Whether our moods are conducive to our goals will
depend on our goals. If one of my life goals is to be a writer, the mood that most effectively
motivates me to write may not be a good one. Some people find themselves suddenly
surprisingly articulate when they are in a frustrated mood. Others—when they are in a
melancholy or playful mood. If I am one of those people, it doesn't mean that it is conducive to
my overall goals to always be frustrated or melancholy or playful. But it means that being in
those moods sometimes is overall conducive to my goals.
This also holds for more universal goals. Someone in a good mood may write off a
persistent cough as allergies but someone in an anxious mood may well head to the doctor and
discover that it requires immediate treatment. A person in a good mood might trust that they
turned off the stove while an anxious person may go back to find it filling the apartment with
gas.
One thing we see in situations like this is just how much our context determines what the
most goal-conducive mood is. In a country where it is easy to go to the doctor, the anxious mood
can make the desire to get the cough checked strong enough to do so. In a country that requires
significant effort to get or pay for an appointment, anxiety might make the prospect of going
through the process seem impossibly hard.
The many dimensions of mood also affect how and which beliefs we form. How willing
people are to accept certain types of evidence, whether they will be motivated to look for more
evidence, or to revise their beliefs will vary with the color of their mood. Once again, the beliefs
55
and evidence in question, as well as the surrounding environment will determine which mood is
optimal for tracking the world as it is. Someone in an adventurous mood may well be in a bad
position to accurately estimate the dangers of hiking a particular trail while a bored or frustrated
person may be in a better one. A person in a serene mood might be in a better position than any
of them. Aitken et al. (2019) shows us, for example, that individuals in anxious moods or with
more anxious personalities were significantly quicker at spotting incidents about to turn
aggressive over CCTV . These judgments were as accurate and as confident as those made by
non-anxious individuals—just faster.
So, along each of the three dimensions we discussed—motivation, accuracy, and
prudence—the particular type of mood, not just whether it is a good or bad one will play a role.
3.2 Complex Good Moods and Complex Bad Moods
But even if we do stick only to the grayscale good/bad mood spectrum, things aren’t that
simple. It is just not the case that bad moods always make us worse off at any of the things we
have been concerned about.
3.2.1 Doing the Right Thing
Consider, first, helping behavior—the thing that people most often associate with positive
mood priming. It isn’t always straightforward. For example, Thompson et al. (1980) showed that
when people are put in a bad mood by thoughts of other people’s misfortunes—if they have to
think of the suffering of a sick loved one, for instance—they are more likely to engage in helping
behavior than if they are in a bad mood thinking about their own suffering caused by the loved
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one's illness. Both groups exhibited the same level of bad mood but their reactions were notably
different. Strikingly, those who focused on others’ misfortunes were significantly more helpful
than the control neutral group or the group that focused on their own pain.
On the flip side, Rosenhan et al (1981) showed that when people are put in a good mood
by asking them to imagine good things happening to a loved one or a friend, they were
significantly less likely to engage in helping behavior than those people who were put in a good
mood by imagining good things happening to themselves. Again, both groups reported the same
level of good mood but the difference in helping was stark. In particular, while the difference in
helping between those who imagined good things for themselves and the controls was fairly
small, those who thought of the fortunes of their loved ones were were much less likely to help
than those in the control group.
What we see is that even when we are only talking about helping behavior, there are
some bad moods that impeded helping but there are also bad moods that promote helping. There
are good moods that make us likelier to help and good moods that make us significantly less
likely to help.
We also see that moods affect our motivation by changing our evaluative judgments. For
example, positive moods are associated with more risk taking behavior (Johnson and Tversky,
1983) and depressed moods with being more conservative about risk (Kramer and Weber, 2012)
though interestingly, positive moods are associated with less risk taking if the stakes are high
(Isen and Geva, 1987). Noval and Stahl (2017) draw on a number of resources to explain these
kinds of results, particularly in corporate contexts. They argue that what accounts for this is that
people in positive moods judge the positive consequences of a prosocial act as greater and more
57
likely than those in negative moods do. Conversely, those in positive moods also judge the
negative consequences of a harmful act as less serious and less likely than those in negative
moods do. The result is, Noval and Stahl continue, is that managers in good moods are more
likely to go out on a limb to engage in a philanthropic project than managers in bad moods. At
the same time, those managers are also more likely to take unnecessary harmful actions than
those in bad moods. So, while mood may influence our judgments in such a way that good
moods make us more like to actively help, they also influence our judgments in a way that good
moods make us more likely to actively hurt.
There is also evidence that bad moods can make us more likely to act on some of our
evaluative judgments. Recall the way that Smith (1995) characterized the effect of mood on
motivation. The general picture was that depressed mood—insofar as it inhibits our desires to act
in accordance with our evaluative judgments—makes us less rational. This picture lacks nuance.
Which moods make it easier to act in accordance with our value judgment depends, in part, on
the evaluative judgment in question.
For example, Forgas (1999) demonstrated through a variety of experiments that people in
sad moods tend to be more polite in making requests than people in good moods. I think we are
justified in assuming that, on average, the sad people in the study thought rudeness was as wrong
as the people in good moods did. However, something about either the desire structure of sad
22
We may be tempted here to think that this shows people's evaluative judgments changing with their
22
mood rather than their ability to be motivated in accordance with their judgment. Perhaps those in good
moods tend to evaluate politeness as less important, less valuable, and so on. Despite the fact that moods
certainly do affect our evaluative judgments, I find this interpretation unlikely for this case. But even if it
is the correct interpretation, this study still serves as an analog to Smith's point about depressed moods.
After all, we could also explain lack of some kinds of motivation in depressed moods as a result of mood
effects on evaluative judgments. So, in whatever way Smith shows depressed moods to inhibit some kinds
of motivation, Forgas' study provides us with an argument that good moods inhibit other kinds of
motivation.
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people or some other mechanism made it easier for them to act in accordance with their value
judgment. Those in good moods, on the other hand, were significantly less polite and,
presumably, more out of line with respect to their evaluative judgments.
So, whether it’s about simply doing things that are morally good or being motivated by
our moral judgments, bad moods are not always worse than good moods. Sometimes, they’re
actually better.
3.2.2 Getting it Right
We have seen, through looking at the example of CBT, that there is a pervading
assumption that bad moods distort our perceptions of reality compared to good moods. However,
there is also significant evidence that sometimes bad moods actually help us perceive the world
more accurately than good moods.
One source of support for this phenomenon, now known largely as “depressive realism,”
was first made popular by experiments by Alloy and Abramson’s 1979 paper “Judgment of
Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?” Depressive realism is
the hypothesis that sometimes depressed people are, in fact, more realistic in their judgments
than those who are not depressed. That is, there are some biases that non-depressed people have
that depressed people lack.
What makes the phenomenon truly controversial is the very fact that it goes against the
basic tenets of CBT. This does not have to trouble us here. The claim that depressed moods make
us more accurate with respect to some things doesn’t show that they always go along with more
realistic judgments. As we have seen, this tracks with how moods operate more generally—
59
certain moods seem to affect some beliefs and desires but not others. So, depressive realism
might indicate that some beliefs are more accurate in bad moods or among depressed individuals.
CBT can still be an effective strategy even if it was developed on partially flawed assumptions.
A quick note about the word “depression” here. One consistent criticism of the depressive
realism literature has been that many of the studies tested patients who were not diagnosed with
clinical depression. Rather, they were experiencing mild symptoms—symptoms that generally
align with persistent bad mood—which can resolve much more quickly than clinical depression.
While this can be troubling for psychologists trying to figure out the nature of depression—the
mental illness—it bodes well for the purpose of this dissertation which is more concerned with
depression—the mood. Except for two meta-analyses, every study I will mention in this section
used participants with these milder, mood-like symptoms.
23
In Alloy and Abramson’s original study, the participants had to judge how much pressing
the button in front of them controlled whether a light would turn on. They found that while
nondepressed students overestimated their level of control, depressed students were significantly
more accurate. This and similar effects has been later found in a large amount of studies.
24
Depressive realism has been a controversial phenomenon. There are many studies
supporting the idea but also many studies inconsistent with the hypothesis. One worry in studies
supporting depressive realism is about whether the depressed subjects are really tracking truth or
simply stumbling on the right answer in certain circumstances because they systematically rate
things more negatively. Stone et al. (2001), for example, tested depressed and nondepressed
What makes these studies different from more explicit mood studies, however, is that they do not
23
involve a mood-induction procedure as part of the experiment. Instead, the participants are typically asked
to fill out a questionnaire that assesses their general symptoms and mental state.
See Moore and Fresno (2012) for a helpful overview.
24
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students’ assessments of their own performance on a general knowledge test. Nondepressed
students were more overconfident about their individual answers than depressed students (both
groups were at least somewhat overconfident) but while nondepressed students were fairly
accurate about their general performance, depressed students underrated theirs, suggesting a
negativity bias. While findings like this lend important nuance to how we interpret some of the
depressive realism studies, this doesn’t explain results where the participants are not rating things
as good or bad.
Take, for example, the striking study by Harkness et al. (2005). They tested how accurate
participants were at reading mental states off of pictures of people’s eyes. The participants were
asked to answer three different types of questions. One type had a cropped picture of a person’s
eyes and four choices of mental state that the eyes may be expressing. The second type also had
cropped pictures of human eyes but only two choices, “male” and “female.” Finally, the third
type had a picture of an animal and four choices for traits of the animal. While both depressed
and nondepressed participants scored similarly on the gender and animal questions, the
depressed participants were significantly better at reading the emotions in people’s eyes. One
particularly surprising result was that they were more accurate with respect to the full range of
expressions—not just negative emotions. That is, depressed subjects were more accurate at
recognizing positive and neutral emotions as well.
Moreover, Ackermann and DeRubeis (1991) and Moore and Fresno (2012) conducted
analyses of the depressive realism literature. Ackermann and DeRubeis brought up a number of
critiques but still stated that at least the results about contingency judgments—judgments about
control demonstrated by studies like Alloy and Abramson’s—hold up to scrutiny. Moore and
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Fresno’s analysis—a much bigger and later one—also highlighted some concerns but showed
that even when we are more careful about methodological concerns, the literature still indicates a
slight depressive realism effect.
We can see results similar to those of Alloy and Abramson (1979) in studies that
specifically target mood rather than depression of any kind. In a series of experiments, Forgas
(1998) tested how moods may affect the presence of fundamental attribution error—a human
tendency to ascribe dispositional and personality-level explanations to people’s actions over
situational or environmental explanations. After undergoing a mood induction into a negative,
neutral, or positive mood, participants were asked to read an argumentative passage where the
position was either said to be chosen by the author or assigned to them. The participants were
then asked a series of question about the author, including whether they personally supported the
position they defended. In all three experiments, those in a negative mood were significantly
likelier to avoid attributing particular opinions to authors of the assigned or coerced essays,
thereby avoiding fundamental attribution error. Moreover, when in experiment 3, participants
were also asked to recall details about the essays, the negative mood participants were
substantially better at the task than positive mood participants or controls.
Indeed, mood effects on memory are another domain in which bad moods help us get
things right in a way that good moods do not. A number of studies have demonstrated that good
moods make people more susceptible to integrating false information into their memories and
generating false memories. In her 1979 pioneering book Eyewitness Testimony, Elizabeth Loftus
pointed out just how easily false information can be implanted in someone’s memory—how
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easily people can be led to remember things that didn’t actually happen. Turns out, this effect is
partly modulated by moods.
In one related study, Storbeck and Clore (2005) explored how mood affects false recall of
words. They used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a method that has been
effective in making people misremember in structured ways. The participants are provided with a
list of related words. Take, for example: table, sit, legs, seat, soft, desk, arm, sofa, wood, cushion,
rest, and stool. These words are all connected to a critical word that is not on the list: chair. The
striking thing is that, as Roediger and McDermott (1995) showed, when participants are
presented with a larger list of words and asked whether the critical word was part of the list, they
are very likely to say it was—as likely as recalling a word from the middle part of the actual list.
Storbeck and Clore used the same set up to see if people in good and bad moods would be
equally susceptible to recalling the critical word that was not on the list. They found that people
in bad moods were significantly less likely to think the word on the list than those in positive
moods or controls.
In a study geared specifically to suss out mood effects on witness testimony, Forgas et al.
(2005) examined how people in different moods would answer leading questions after witnessing
a particular situation and whether they would later recall the misleading details as real. What
they found was that even though people in good and bad moods were about equal with respect to
remembering unrelated incorrect details, those in a good mood were overwhelmingly more likely
to incorporate the misleading information from the experiment into their memory than those in
bad moods.

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3.2.3. Getting what we want
As we have already seen in section 2.1, which moods are most conducive to our goals has
a lot to do with our goals as well as the circumstances of the world we live in. Imagine you value
courtesy or live in a world where breaches of etiquette can set one back. Imagine you value
justice and live in a world rife with competing stories and disinformation. Imagine you value
understanding other people’s feelings and opinions. If any of these are true of you, there are
some times in which it may be more conducive to your goals to be in a bad mood than a good
mood. Not always. But sometimes. That is, various good moods and various bad moods open up
different avenues for us. Depending on the state of our environment and the nature of our goals,
some of these avenues will be more helpful than others. Crucially, the avenues opened up by
good moods will not always be the most helpful ones.
4. Attention
Now that we have explored the complex relationship between moods and their effects, we
see that the picture is complex. Improving your own mood is not just making yourself feel better
but also making your behavior more risky. It may increase how likely you are to help someone
but it may also decrease it. With respect to the question of what mood best positions us to
morally, epistemically, or prudentially deal with a particular situation, the results are irreparably
mixed.
The question is, then, what accounts for moods' connection to these features we are
interested in? Here, I will argue that it is attention.
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The way our attention moves has a great deal to do with our moods. Depending on our
mood, different things will attract our attention—different things will jump out to us. Imagine
having lunch in a cafe and noticing the pleasant smells, the bustling atmosphere, and how
comfortable the chairs are. That sounds like a good mood. On the other hand, if what you notice
is the repeated irregular buzzing of someone’s phone, how cramped with people the place is, and
that the table has a bit of a wobble, then maybe your mood is not so great. Moreover, how what
we attend to changes our moods. Imagine a bout of anxiety—your thoughts become fixated, your
heart begins to race. If you pause and concentrate on describing the objects around you, the
anxiety is likely to begin to recede.
It is already part of our understanding of moods that attention plays a key role in our
experience of them. However, to make the case that it is attention that is responsible for
determining which moods are conducive to morality, accuracy, and prudence, I will proceed in
two parts. First, I will show that, like mood, attention also has close relationships to desires,
beliefs, and actions. Then, in the following section, I will return to moods and demonstrate how
attention moderates the mood effects we discussed in sections 1 and 2.
4.1 Attention Effects on Desire, Belief, and Action
In the previous sections, we explored how moods affect our desires, our beliefs, and our
actions. Attention also has a close relationship to these things. I will take these in turn.
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4.1.1 Desire and Attention
A number of philosophers have pointed to the deep connection between attention and
desire (Scanlon, 1998; Schroeder, 2004; Schroeder, 2007; Arpaly and Schroeder, 2014). In In
Praise of Desire (2014), Arpaly and Schroeder state:
[I]f you desire to see birds you will be more likely to notice a somewhat hidden
bird then another person would (and more likely to miss, due to lack of attention,
the fact that the bird stands on top of a remarkable building). If you desire the
victory of the Red Sox you will notice that the person a few rows from you on the
airplane is wearing a Red Sox shirt. (125)
Arpaly and Schroeder note that this connection is not constitutive to desire. Someone who has
ADHD or someone who is deeply preoccupied with some other issue may not notice things
connected to their desires even though they desire it just as much as the person who does notice
them. Still, it is a general feature that the things that jump out to us, the things our attention is
drawn to is importantly shaped by our desires.
The effect goes the other way as well. Sometimes it takes focusing on something or
noticing it repeatedly to begin desiring it. Sometimes this is because you didn't know this was a
thing in the world that was out there to be desired. But often it's simply that paying attention to
something can fan a desire for it or increase the desire's motivational pull. I may not start out
liking a particular brand but simply walking by their shop on my daily commute can make me
want to buy something there. This is part of why advertising works—even just having our
attention drawn to certain products or the products' features, we come to want them. So, it is a
general feature that the things we want are importantly shaped by what we attend to.
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4.1.2 Beliefs and Attention
Similarly, beliefs have an important connection to attention. What objects we pay
attention to has a profound effect on the beliefs we end up forming and vice versa. The person
who desires to see birds and, therefore, only directs their attention to the bird sitting on top of a
remarkable building lacks beliefs about the remarkable building that a person less interested in
birds might. When we focus our attention on information that, say, agrees with our opinions, we
may revise our beliefs differently than someone who pays attention to a wider swath of available
information.
Even when people pay attention to the same things, their beliefs may well differ because
of the features of those objects that they pay attention to. A show could be deemed really good by
one person because they loved the storytelling. Another may judge the show a waste of time
because they were too distracted by the animation style to appreciate the story.
4.1.3 Actions and Attention
Together, beliefs, desires and, thereby, attention help shape our actions. But attention can
play an even more direct role in our actions. Attention can change whether we are even able to
perform certain tasks. Consider the idea of flow. When we are in a flow state, our attention is
fully absorbed in our activity, we feel good, things are going smoothly. But if our attention strays
away from the activity or even begins to focus on the mechanics of the activity, things can
quickly begin to go wrong. That is, attention can affect the very way that we are able to act or
move.
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Attention’s connection to moods on the one hand and to our desires, beliefs, and actions
on the other makes it a candidate for explaining the interaction between these two groups. In the
next section, I will argue that our evidence about the relationship between moods, judgments,
and actions supports an attentional explanation.
4.2 Moods and Attention
Let us now return to moods. We have seen that while good moods have been generally
embraced as the most advantageous morally, epistemically, and prudentially, the picture is more
complex. In fact, we have puzzling cases of some particular good moods being disadvantageous
in one or more of these respects and some particular bad moods being, in fact, quite good.
What’s striking is that once we look at these special cases, we can see that it is attention that is
doing the work.
Consider again the experiments by Thompson et al. (1980) and Rosenhan et al. (1981).
Together, they showed that what you attend to in both good and bad moods is what determines
your helping behavior. If you are put in a bad mood by imagining another’s potential suffering or
if you are put in a good mood about thinking of your own potential fortune, you are more likely
to help someone. If, however, you are put in a bad mood by imagining your own potential
suffering or are put in a good mood by imagining someone else’s potential fortune, you are
significantly less likely to help. Even though the participants report their mood as equally good
or bad, we see that the attention aspect of the mood changes the motivational features of their
respective moods.
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What’s interesting about these cases is that these two experiments together show that the
objects of attention are quite specific. We cannot explain these results by saying that attending to
others has one effect and attending to oneself has another. No, the situation we imagine also
matters. Indeed, we can explain these results in terms of attention effects on belief and desire.
Focusing on imagining our own misfortune or someone else’s fortune makes us feel hard done
by which can increase our desire to act selfishly. Conversely, focusing on others’ misfortune or
our own fortune can make us feel comparatively well off and increase our desire to reach out to
help others.
Attentional explanations are also available when we are thinking about cases where
moods help us be more accurate. For example, the reason that Aitken et al. (2019) found that
anxious individuals are faster at detecting the onset of aggression was because they set out to test
how attentional biases associated with anxiety might be useful. People in anxious moods are
simply quicker to latch their attention on markers predictive of aggression.
One interesting source of evidence for an attentional explanation is the way that the
epistemic effects of moods can be negated. Ambady and Gray (2002) demonstrated that people in
bad moods are worse at quickly recognizing teaching effectiveness or judging people’s
relationships. What’s remarkable is that in their last experiment they asked the bad mood
participants to count back from 1000 in increments of 7 as they performed the task. These
participants didn’t only do better than other bad mood participants but were actually as accurate
as neutral mood participants. Turns out that paying less attention to the task actually made the
bad mood participants more accurate. This confirmed the researchers’ suspicion that, like an
athlete who chokes because they focus too much on the mechanics of their movement, people in
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bad moods focus too much on social cues, making the usually automatic process less accurate.
But once their attention is forced away with another small task, their accuracy is restored.
Similarly, let us go back to Forgas et al. (2005) and testing how people in good and bad
moods integrate misleading information into their eyewitness accounts. In their last experiment,
they asked half of the participants to suppress their feelings and not express them. Some
participants were independently shown to be bad self-monitors and, for that group, the
instruction to suppress their feelings didn’t change their results. However, for the group that had
been determined to be good self-monitors, the results were stark—the mood effects were
diminished. That is, those in positive moods became more accurate and those in negative moods
became less accurate. So, for those who were adept at doing so, simply paying attention to their
feelings and to how the feelings expressed themselves negated the mood effects on accuracy.
Attention does not simply explain the cases of mood that don’t fit with the GMB
framework. Attention can also explain why the framework was appealing in the first place.
Let’s go back to CBT. Attention can explain why CBT can be an effective treatment for
persistent low mood or depression even if it doesn’t necessarily come with false beliefs. Aside
from helping people sit down to process their feelings and life experiences, therapists help
patients attend to the world in a different way and to surround themselves with things that are
more worth paying attention to. When a therapist helps someone reframe a situation, they ask
people to focus on different aspects of the situation. When they help patients deal with anxiety,
they frequently help patients learn to disengage their attention from the things causing their
anxiety or at least not to let them overly focus on those things.
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Moreover, we can see why many of the practices of positive thinking, even the magical-
sounding ones, can sometimes help people live better lives. Having a vision board where you
post pictures of things you want in life may not magically attract those things to you, but it can
serve as a regular reminder of your goals and dreams. Speaking positive affirmations may not
ward off misfortune but it can help us focus on the good things about ourselves and our lives that
we may have a hard time keeping in mind otherwise. Even the feeling that we have greater
control over the external world with our thoughts and intentions might help us pay attention to
some wonderful possibilities we might not have otherwise noticed. Each of these can backfire.
Having a vision board can make us attend to how far we are from where we want to be. Positive
affirmations can feel like gaslighting oneself and thinking that we have control of the world
through our intentions not only fails to track reality but can lead to unnecessary self-blame when
things do not go our way. Still, we can see how the various techniques promoted by the GMB
framework use attention to help us get the benefits they associate exclusively with good mood.
Once we embrace the attentional explanation of these various mood effects, we can also
see why it is so misguided to think that we must maximize good moods. Of course, there is
nothing wrong with being positive, cheering people up, and so on. One thing that good moods
certainly have going for them is that they feel good. And, indeed, they do have plenty of good
effects. However, due to the multidimensional nature of moods as well as the complexity of
human beings and the world they inhabit, we are not usually in a position to issue broad
statements about what mood would benefit someone morally, epistemically, or prudentially in
any kind of generalized situation. What we can do, however, is direct people’s attention.
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5. Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that there is an underlying framework that has been
dominating important parts of both academic and general culture—a framework that takes good
moods to be superior to bad moods in every respect. Not only do they feel good but they help us
be more moral, more accurate, and more successful at our goals. I then argued that this is not the
case. Instead, I argued that the mood effects on morality, accuracy, and success are features of
how we direct our attention. This does not mean that we need to abandon talk of moods and only
talk about attention instead when we discuss these things. On the contrary, I think what this
reveals is that the connection between moods and attention is tighter than previously supposed
and that we cannot talk about moods without talking about attention. I turn to the exact nature of
this connection in the following chapter.
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CHAPTER 3
MOODS ARE PATTERNS OF ATTENTION
1. Introduction
What we have seen so far is that moods get a lot of their most important and interesting
features from their connection to attention. In this chapter, I argue for a view of mood that stems
directly from this insight. I propose that we see moods simply as our patterns of attention. So,
what it is to be in some mood is to be exhibiting a particular pattern of attention.
I will present the view in five stages. First, I address why I think that the relationship
between moods and patterns of attention has to be constitutive rather than some other close
relationship such as a dispositional or causal one. Then, I lay out what I take to be the elements
of a pattern of attention. While I believe that all moods are patterns of attention, not all patterns
of attention are moods. So, in the third section, I articulate which patterns should be considered
mood patterns. Then, in the fourth section, I turn to examining in more detail what the objects of
attention are in moods and how this bears on moods’ intentionality. In section five, I provide a
theory of mood individuation based on the patterns of attention view. Finally, I conclude with a
few thoughts about some implications of accepting this account of moods.
2. Why Constitution?
Raisa is taking a long stroll through some expansive botanical gardens. She starts in a
good mood. She notices the fresh air against her face and arms, the beauty of the flowers, the
excited chatter of the other visitors. As Raisa gets worn out, her mood begins to spoil. The
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flowers are still pretty but there is a lack of signage about the layout of the gardens. There is also
inadequate shade or places to sit and rest.
In cases like this, we can observe that there is a general correlation between changes in
mood and changes in the things that we pay attention to. In fact, as I have explored in the first
two chapters, attention can help us explain some of the most important features of moods.
For one, as I argued in the previous chapter, attention explains how moods relate to our
success at being moral, epistemic, and prudent agents. Moreover, as I noted in section 3.4.1 of
chapter 1, attention can explain how it is that moods can change both in response to arational as
well as rational factors.
The question is how we should spell out this connection between moods and attention. I
will argue that the right answer is constitution by ruling out the other possible connections. First,
I will consider an analysis of moods as dispositions to attend. After I show that this account gives
us incorrect predictions about moods, I consider a weaker connection between moods and
attention: a merely causal one. Perhaps moods simply cause patterns of attention or patterns of
attention cause moods (or both) without including attention as part of the mood itself. Having
ruled these options out, I then turn to the constitution view and explain how it accounts for some
intuitions that seem to support the causal view. Once these intuitions have been explained, I will
turn to spelling out the details of the constitutive account in section 3.
2.1 Dispositions to Attend
As Raisa gets tired and begins noting the less pleasant aspects of the gardens, she doesn’t
lose the ability to attend to its good aspects. But she is certainly disposed to attend to the less
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pleasant ones. Perhaps the right analysis of moods is that they are dispositions to attend in
particular ways or the thing that causes us to have these dispositions to attend.
Unfortunately, it is neither the case that people with different dispositions to attend must
be in different moods nor that people with the same dispositions must be in the same mood.
Consider four friends: April, Mei, Jun, and Julie. Suppose April and Jun have a
disposition to attend to what happened to them in the past year—if they indulged this disposition,
the ups and downs of the past would make them feel depressed or melancholy. Mei and Julie, on
the other hand, have a disposition to attend to the uncertainty of things coming up in the next
year. Were they to indulge this disposition, they would be anxious.
Jun and Julie indulge those dispositions. Jun is in a depressed mood. Julie is in an anxious
one. Their moods are clearly very different. As it happens, however, both April and Mei take the
day to distract themselves and relax. They direct their attention to some calm music and every
time their thoughts begin to turn to the depressing past or the anxiety-inducing future, they bring
those thoughts back to their surroundings. They focus on the peaceful atmosphere. If April and
Mei were to suddenly stop their distractions, their thoughts would go right back to sad past and
uncertain future but they don’t let up.
Are April and Jun (or Mei and Julie) in the same mood because they have the same
dispositions? I think not. People distract themselves from their anxious or depressed moods all
the time. The purpose is not to forget that they’re anxious or depressed, it’s to be a bit less
anxious or depressed. Even if we attribute the same type of mood to them—depressed for the
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When I refer to anxiety and depression here, I simply mean the moods and not the corresponding mood
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disorders. Mood disorders frequently have features that are importantly unlike features of regular moods.
It seems perfectly plausible to me to think that, unlike with regular moods, we do attempt to distract
ourselves from our mood disorder to briefly forget about those mood disorders.
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former pair and anxious for the latter—one of them is more depressed/anxious than the other. But
because April and Jun’s dispositions to attend and Mei and Julie’s dispositions to attend are the
same, the disposition account cannot account for the difference in the two cases.
How about April and Mei? While their dispositions are quite different it seems like their
moods are converging as they relax. The fact that they, in distracting themselves, are forcing their
attention in a similar direction, one that is counter to both of their dispositions, matters.
Of course, one could say that the reason that April and Jun are in different moods while
April and Mei are in converging moods is that dispositions necessarily change based on what
they actually end up attending to. Perhaps it is not fully realistic that two people who attend quite
differently for a full day would continue to have the same set of dispositions throughout or that
two people who attend quite similarly would continue to have very different dispositions.
What the dispositional account lacks, however, is an explanation of why April and Mei’s
dispositions would change without appealing to their actual pattern of attention. We can imagine
that as they continue to distract themselves, the way they feel will also change. But, by
stipulation, the thing that distinguishes April from Jun is that they direct their attention
differently. So, even if April and Mei’s change in feelings is responsible for their changing
dispositions, those changes in feelings ultimately stem from actually having different patterns of
attention. Then, it is not the disposition to attend that determines the shape of our moods. The
actual pattern is what is doing the work.
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2.2 Merely Causal Relationship
Perhaps an analysis in terms of dispositions was too strong. Perhaps moods stand in a
merely causal relationship to patterns of attention. This goes along with the way we typically
discuss moods. It seems perfectly normal to say that Raisa ended up fixating on the annoying
features of the gardens because she was in a bad mood. Or, going the other way, that she
transitioned into a bad mood because she started noting these negative features.
My goal here is not to deny these explanatory claims. Since I think that moods are
constituted by patterns of attention, there is a strong sense in which those are true. My goal here
is also not to show that moods do not stand in causal relationships with attention. On the
contrary, as I will address in section 2.3, I think moods both cause and are caused by patterns of
attention. What I want to argue is that it will not do to try to explain the connection between
moods and attention by positing a causal relationship without including attention in the moods
themselves.
The key reason is that a merely causal relationship makes it the case that moods do not
actually possess some of their most important features.
2.2.1 Moods’ Connection to Beliefs
Consider moods' responsiveness to beliefs again. If I hear some devastating news, my
mood will get worse. When someone says something kind to me, my mood will cheer up because
of what they said to me. In chapter 1, I argued that this means that whatever moods are, they are
cognitively penetrable—influenced by cognitive factors in a systematic and coherent way.
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Now, one state that is universally accepted as directly affected by cognitive factors is
attention. If attention is at least partly constitutive of moods, the issue has been resolved. We
know why moods are responsive to changes in belief. If the relation between moods and
attention is merely causal, however, we are in trouble.
The problem is that if attention is merely an effect of moods, attention does not help us
explain the cognitive penetrability of moods at all. If moods affect attention and beliefs also
affect attention, we get no explanation of why beliefs would affect moods.
Things look more promising if we consider attention causing moods. If beliefs affect
attention and attention affects moods, perhaps moods can count as cognitively penetrable. The
problem is that there is an important condition on states we consider cognitively penetrable.
Pylyshyn (1999, p. 343) says that “if a system is cognitively penetrable then the function it
computes is sensitive, in a semantically coherent way, to the organism’s goals and beliefs, that is,
it can be altered in a way that bears some logical relation to what the person knows.” That is,
states don’t inherit this trait simply in virtue of being causally downstream from cognitively
penetrable states. Some philosophers do consider some attention effects on perception to
sometimes count as cases of cognitive penetration (Wu 2017; Stokes 2018). Even so, these
claims are controversial and these arguments do not extend to all the effects of attention. We
would need a lot of work to show that the effects of attention on moods are focused enough to
fulfill the semantic coherence requirement. That is, we then have to ask ourselves if other
candidate views of moods are likely to be cognitively penetrable.
One popular view in psychology is that moods are feelings (Schwartz and Clore, 2003) or
else a combination of positive/negative affect with a level of energy (Thayer, 1996). Another is
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Laura Sizer's (2000) view that moods are biases of our cognitive architecture. Both of these
categories are so broad that it seems deeply unlikely that the content of a belief could explain
these effects. This is particularly easy to see in the case of Sizer's view. Moods bias our minds in
a myriad ways: from changing how we process our surroundings and ideas to what and how we
remember. How could the semantic content of a single belief explain all these various changes?
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To a lesser extent, we can see this with a feelings account: it is difficult to imagine an account on
which the content of a belief can explain the various bodily and emotional feelings we associate
with mood.
So, it seems like the person who wants to explain the cognitive penetrability of moods in
terms of something other than attention is in trouble. There is no generally accepted component
of moods that has this feature.
2.2.2 Moods’ Effect on Motivation and Accuracy
Now let us think again about the kinds of mood effects we looked at in chapter 2. We
have seen that typical mood effects on the morality of our actions, on our motivations, on the
accuracy of our judgments, and on our success are best explained by attention effects. Of course,
if attention is constitutive of moods, we can explain these attention effects as mood effects. The
question is whether we can make sense of them as mood effects with a merely causal connection
between moods and attention.
Right away, we can see that if the attention that causes these effects is also what causes
the mood, then the mood is not playing any role in what seem to be mood effects. So, on a purely
Sizer herself brings up this point as a major part of her argument. However, she argues that the
26
conclusion we should draw is that moods are not cognitively penetrable after all.
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causal view, we need a picture of moods such that moods would cause particular attention
patterns and those patterns, in turn, would have the moral, epistemic, and prudential effects.
So, what we would need for a merely causal—and not constitutive—relationship between
moods and attention is an account of moods that is nuanced enough to explain how moods can
cause the nuanced patterns of attention needed to explain all these effects.
The point can be illustrated by considering the feelings view of moods. Recall results like
those in Thompson et al.’s (1980) study. They showed that how we direct our attention in a mood
that we rank as feeling equally negative determines whether we will be likely to engage in
helping behavior. Clearly a view that moods are just positive or negative feelings cannot account
for this. The feelings are not nuanced enough to cause one pattern of attention in one case
resulting in certain behavior and a different pattern of attention in another case resulting in a
different behavior.
Suppose, on the other hand, that moods are, like many psychologists take them to be,
combinations of negative/positive feelings and a level of energy. Anxiety and irritability are both
negative high energy moods but they have different motivational properties. In order to explain
this, we need to explain how these two moods that occupy the same valence/energy space can
have distinct enough effects on our attention to have these different motivational effects.
As I have tried to show in chapter 2, mood effects can get quite nuanced and it is a
particular virtue of attention that it seems able to account for them. This means that whatever
account of moods we embrace has to either take attention patterns to be constitutive of moods or
be some phenomenon that is at least as nuanced as attention patterns are. This will be hard.
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One account that could do the job is Laura Sizer’s biases in the cognitive architecture
account. Our cognitive architecture is, naturally, incredibly complex and more nuanced than just
our attention in virtue of having more moving parts to it. Unfortunately, as we saw in section
2.2.1, Sizer’s account of mood cannot explain beliefs directly affecting moods.
If I am right that moods are both directly affected by beliefs and have the kinds of
motivational and epistemic effects we have discussed and if we do not have a non-attentional
account that explains both of these features, we must discard the merely causal account in favor
of constitution.
2.3 Constitution and the causal relationship between moods and attention
Before I move on to the details of what a constitutive account of moods as patterns of
attention can look like, I'd like to linger a bit more on the causal. I have explained why moods
cannot have at least one important feature without including attention as part of the mood but I
haven't really addressed the basic intuition that there is temporal distance between changes in
mood and changes in attention. If the relationship between moods and attention is really
constitutive, we should not observe this kind of lag. I think, however, the constitutive account
can explain away this apparent discrepancy.
Consider cases where it seems that attention follows mood. Suppose Avnish is in an
irritable mood and snaps at his boyfriend José for chewing too loudly. When José asks for an
explanation, Avnish may say that his mood made him snap. His mood made it hard for him to
stop paying attention to a sound he found unpleasant. The mood caused this instance of attending
to the chewing.
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The answer, I think, is that patterns of attention—particularly, mood patterns of attention
—tend to reinforce themselves. Patterns of attention tend to follow (metaphorically, of course) a
type of law of inertia. A pattern that has certain features will continue having these features
unless something gets in its way. So, Avnish's pattern of attention that constitutes his irritable
mood will cause his attention to continue having these features—that is, it will cause Avnish to
keep attending to certain features of himself and his environment.
Of course, not all patterns self-reinforce in the same way and many patterns simply tend
to evolve in particular directions. Moods are not static things. In order to attribute a mood to
someone, we typically need more information than just what is happening with them in the
present moment. Moods shift subtly throughout the day based on our surroundings, activities,
and so on. A bored mood can start out neutral and morph into melancholy or even desperation as
it develops. Once we know the way that the mood developed, we can look back at the
ambiguously-valenced boredom and correctly identify it as the beginning stage of our
desperation even though, on its own, it seemed neutral.
Sometimes, however, it feels like the causation of mood and attention goes the other way.
Consider an anxiety spiral. Once we find we're starting to dwell on some possible
disaster, we tend to either focus on it more and more or we begin dwelling on other negative
things. The more we attend to particular negative possibilities and scenarios the more we feel our
anxiety: we begin to feel restless, our heart rate goes up, our chest feels tight. Moreover, one
frequently recommended way to get out of such a spiral is to begin describing the objects around
us. Once we successfully redirect our attention to the neutral objects in our surroundings, the
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tightness begins to let go, we breathe easier, and we feel calmer. It seems like the mood follows
rather than goes along with attending.
Here, it will help us to draw a distinction between weak and strong moods. Weaker
moods are those that may not have any identifiable phenomenology that goes along with them.
Most moods are weak. For example, we could be in a weak playful mood where we attend more
to the quirky aspects of things than we would normally, but not much more. However, because
the pattern is subtle, we may have to work hard to discover our own weak mood, to notice the
pattern. On the other hand, if we let the pattern self-reinforce enough, we can end up in a strong
playful mood that we can identify simply through introspection because the consistent pattern of
attending has raised our energy level, we experience a particular phenomenology and it is easier
for us to identify the pattern of attending because the distinctive features are more frequent or
more pronounced.
With this distinction, we can see what is happening in the anxiety spiral case. It is not the
case that attending in a particular way causes an anxious mood. It is the case that a weak anxious
mood can easily self-reinforce into a strong anxious mood. Intentionally redirecting attention to
the neutral objects in a room breaks the self-reinforcing anxious pattern of attention, the mood
starts getting weaker, and the phenomenology of a strong mood begins to disappear. But it takes
some time to establish an identifiable new pattern.
So, the rise of feelings is a sign that a pattern has strongly reinforced while a diminishing
of feelings is a sign that the previous pattern is being diluted. The mood begins changing the
moment that you begin redirecting your attention, but it takes a bit of time for it to change
enough for the phenomenology to change as well.
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To put it all together, not only is a constitutive account of moods as patterns of attention
particularly well situated to explain how moods can be responsive to changes of belief as well as
have varied effects on our motivations, beliefs, and general success, but it can also explain the
kind of causal claims we make about moods and attention. So, now I turn to the patterns of
attention account itself.

3. The Account
Since the relationship between attention and moods is neither causal nor dispositional, it
makes sense to explore what a constitutive account would be like. In this section, I explain what
I take a pattern of attention to be. It consists of five elements: four structural and one non-
structural. Taken together they make up a mood.
3.1 Objects
The first and most obvious group of constituents that we need to define the pattern are the
objects of attention. We can have very different moods based solely on attending to qualitatively
and/or quantitatively different objects.
If all I attend to are the worst aspects of everyone I meet, I am in a very different mood
than if I am only attending to the very best, most wonderful aspects of those same people. At the
same time, we can have more similar moods. For example, contrast a mood where my attention
is drawn to people’s various wonderful qualities that I’ve noted before with a mood where my
attention is drawn to people’s various wonderful qualities but ones that are jumping out to me for
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the first time. These moods are extremely close but they are not exactly the same. These
differences may indicate the distinction between moods of delight and wonder.
The objects can be visual objects, smells, sounds, feelings, tastes, or thoughts. They can
be areas of space as when one is simply attending to a particular area of their perceptual field.
These objects can be simple or complex: a dot on a monotone background or a colorful painting.
They can be hallucinations. These objects may be internal or external since I can attend to the
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books on my shelf as well as I can attend to the itching in my left foot or to a memory of a
particular vacation.
The objects of attention are also not limited to objects per se. They can also be properties
of objects as when one focuses on the texture, color, placement, etc. of something. When it
comes to properties, these may be either genuine properties of the objects or those we perceive
them to have. For example, in cases of optical illusions, I assume the object of attention can be
the property that the object seems to—but doesn’t actually—have.
In section 5, I will return to the objects of attention to look at this category a bit more
carefully. However, for now, I hope to have given a helpful gloss.
3.2 Sequence
It is also important that we include the sequence of the objects of attention. Just as we
may identify patterns by pointing to some similarity between objects, we may also identify
patterns in the objects’ order.
Indeed, this order seems to play an important role in mood.
I leave it to philosophers of mind to determine whether attending to a hallucinated cat will play the
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same role in my mood pattern as attending to a real cat.
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A mood in which I attend to increasingly negative things is a different mood than the one
in which I attend to the same things but in reverse order, from the most negative to the most
positive. This can make the difference between spiraling despair and hopeful excitement.
3.3 Duration
The third structural element that we will definitely need for a pattern of attention is
duration.
My attention could focus in on one thing for a while as when one gazes at the stars on a
clear night or for a very short time as when one scans a room upon entering it. Even if we’re
paying attention to the same things, the duration makes a difference to our mood. For example if
my attention is drawn to everyone’s good qualities and also my own bad qualities, it matters for
my mood how long I spend on each. If I pay attention to my own bad qualities only a little and
others’ good qualities for a long time, I might be in a slightly grumpy insecure mood. But the
more the balance shifts toward paying more attention to my own bad qualities, the mood seems
more and more different, sliding from grumpiness and into despair.
To take another case, consider a situation where my attention is divided between the work
on my computer and social media on my phone. Even though the objects of attention are the
same, how long I pay attention to each will have a great effect on my mood. If I pay attention to
my work for twenty five minutes and then switch to social media for five and then go back to
work for a prolonged amount of time, I may be in a positive relaxed mood. But if my attention
keeps jumping between one and the other every couple minutes, this makes for a very different
mood—a tense anxious one.
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3.4 Intensity
The last structural aspect of patterns of attention that needs to go into the account is
intensity. It may be the case that as I’m looking around, nothing particularly jumps out at me—I
can attend to things with the same level of intensity. Or I may be looking at a scene and an object
will stand out to me. Or yet, I may be so engrossed attending to an object that other objects fade
far into the background.
Consider again the case of dividing attention between work and social media. Even if we
hold the sheer amount of time I pay attention to each constant, intensity can completely change
the character of one’s mood. I may be in a very positive relaxed mood when I am very absorbed
with work when working and, then, absorbed by social media when using social media.
However, I may be completely drained and bored if I can’t really get into each activity, can’t
focus on either with the proper intensity.

3.5 Effort
The one non-structural feature of patterns of attention that we need for the account has
less to do with defining the pattern and more with defining a feature of attention itself.
Specifically, it has to do with whether our attention is effortful or not. One of the things that
makes attention so fascinatingly complicated is that attention can be either active or passive.
Sometimes, our attention is active—we can choose to direct our attention to a text and away
from the TV screen. Other times, it is passive. Indeed there are two ways in which it can be
passive: it can be passive and external or passive and internal. That is, our attention can be
passively guided by forces outside of ourselves or passively guided by forces internal to us.
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When our attention is passive and external, our attention is directed by the environment that we
are in. A loud noise will drag our attention to the source of the noise; an out-of-place object can
grab our attention even if we do not want to look. At the same time, our attention can be passive
and internal as when a desire to travel may drag our attention to advertisements of vacation
spots. Our agency constantly competes with our environment and our unconscious states for
control of our attention.
If we are lucky, we do not usually notice the distinction between passive and active
attention because they switch so smoothly from one to the other. We allow our attention to
wander passively and when we want to actively attend, we manage to successfully redirect our
attention with little to no resistance. At other times, however, passive attention and active
attention get stuck and begin to grind against each other.
We see this in cases of apparent weakness of will. It can be difficult to actively focus our
attention: I know I ought to concentrate, I try to pull my attention toward the task at hand, but it
just wanders away. Alternatively, my passive attention may get stuck on something—an
overpriced gadget that I want, for example. It can seem like no matter how I try to divert my
attention to something else, it keeps inching back toward the gadget.
The conflict of passive and active attention also frequently occurs when we are learning
or perfecting a skill. When learning how to reconstruct a premise-conclusion argument from a
piece of writing, our passive attention may slide right over key phrases like “leads to,” “this is
because,” “necessary,” and so on. It is our job, as we learn, to force our attention to select these
words and we can feel the force of active attention fighting against our passive responses.
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Whether our attention is gliding smoothly from passive to active and vice versa matters
for our mood. A contemplative mood where our attention smoothly switches from one thing to
another is quite different from boredom where we try to but fail to sustain attention on anything.
Once we have accounted for these five elements, we have successfully picked out a
pattern of attention.
4. Which Patterns?
There are some actual patterns of attention, however, that do not seem very mood-like.
Attending to the clock at 11:11 every morning does not seem to be a mood. Attending to the first
problem on a test followed by attending to the second problem and so on doesn’t seem like a
mood. So, while the patterns of attention account commits us to the claim that all moods are
patterns of attention, it does not commit us to the claim that all patterns of attention are moods. It
is, then, conceptually possible on the patterns of attention account to have different overall
attention patterns but be in the exact same mood as long as the mood pattern is exactly the same.
So, what separates the mood patterns from the non-mood patterns?
I’m not sure that a fully satisfying answer exists. I do not think that mood patterns are
fundamentally different from other patterns of attention. But I think I can give a couple helpful
suggestions.
Roughly speaking, mood patterns are those that have a preponderance of objects toward
which one has affective attitudes or evaluative beliefs. Consider a pattern that includes attending
to a randomized series of numbers. Unless one is a great lover of numbers or someone for whom
the numbers have significance, this doesn't strike us as a mood. Consider, on the other hand, a
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pattern that includes continuously attending to things one is grateful for. Or else a pattern that
includes continuously paying attention to things one wants but does not have. These two both
seem significantly more mood-like. Perhaps, they are not quite nuanced enough or fleshed out
enough to be moods by themselves but they are certainly plausible constituents of a mood
pattern.
At the same time, sometimes the lack of affective attitudes or evaluative beliefs are
precisely the aspects that make a pattern of attention a mood pattern. Imagine carrying out a task
which doesn’t matter to you at all and that you do not have particular evaluative beliefs about:
it’s neither good nor bad, neither useless nor particularly meaningful. What better task to put you
in the mood of sheer existential angst?! (Perhaps this is the reason that data entry sounds like
such a dreadful job.)
Mood patterns tend to be those that are fairly dense (involve objects toward which one
has relevant attitudes that are temporally close to each other) and exist primarily in time ranges
measured by hours and days. Shorter periods are tricky. Some short durations are simply too
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short to set up a meaningful pattern (again, a vague notion). So I don't think that it makes sense
to talk about minute-long moods. At the same time, in a deeply variable environment moods can
change pretty quickly.
Suppose Emily discovers that a fox broke into her chicken coop and her chickens are
missing. That makes her quickly spiral into a foul mood. Emily took so much time raising them
and building the coop and it's cold outside and things in general could be better and now this! On
Since moods are constantly shifting and evolving, there is a sense in which it simply does not make
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sense to talk about the duration of moods. But I attempt to do so anyway. I will address the individuation
of moods at length in section 6.
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top of everything?! After some fevered searching over the next half hour, Emily discovers that
the chickens managed to get on top of some tree branches and out of harm's way. The flood of
relief and joy at the chickens' unexpected resourcefulness perks her mood right up. I see no
reason to claim that Emily didn't start out in one mood and then underwent two quick mood
transitions. She did. Still, describing her experience in terms of her mood might not be the fastest
way to explain what was going on—we might do better to focus on her acute emotions during
this relatively short period.
The issue similarly gets tricky when we think about longer term patterns. On one hand, if
the pattern stays dense enough that it would be considered a mood in a shorter period, there is
nothing technically stopping someone from remaining in a similar mood for days, weeks,
months, or years. Granted, that's quite unlikely.
There are long-term patterns that are less dense but still strike us as at least mood-
adjacent.
Ben-Ze'ev (2017), for example, calls long-lasting happiness a mood. We can make sense
of this on the patterns of attention view. A happy person may not always feel happy or pleased
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but their patterns of attention may consistently include attending in ways and to objects that
contribute to a good mood. In order to become happier, people are frequently encouraged to
focus on particular positive thoughts every day or to make daily note of things that they are
grateful for. These are occasional mood altering redirections of attention. Once these become
ingrained habits, we may talk about these as someone's long-lasting or baseline mood.
Though I think we can make sense of Ben-Ze'ev's (2017) idea of happiness as a long-lasting mood on
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the patterns of attention view, I do not claim to know what happiness is.
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Often, however, I think long term patterns in attention are probably better analyzed as
personality traits or temperament rather than mood. Some of these might be thought of as
dispositions to get into certain mood patterns. An anxious person is someone who experiences
anxious moods frequently or easily. A calm person is someone it's hard to jostle out of their
baseline mood. A moody person is someone whose moods tend to be strong and to change
frequently. Some other personality traits, while clearly having to do with patterns of attention,
feel less mood-like. An optimistic person attends to the positive aspects of things more than the
average person. An inconsiderate person consistently fails to attend to the needs of others. And
so on.
Ultimately, I hope to have demonstrated that I see the notion of a mood as a way to single
out some patterns of attention that are salient in our lives. But patterns of attention can be salient
in different ways and it makes sense for us to classify them in different categories even if we
may not see a robust distinction between them.
I will return to carving up the category of moods in section 6 when I will discuss how we
ought to individuate moods. Before that, I'd like to say a bit more about the first constituent of
moods: the objects of attention.
5. The Objects of Attention
5.1 Which Objects?
There is an important worry about the patterns of attention account.
One important feature of moods is that we not only notice the features of objects that are
negative in a bad mood and those that are good in a good mood but that moods make us perceive
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the very same features differently. In one mood we might find a bit of wordplay clever and funny
and yet, in a different mood, we might find the same features of that very wordplay to be corny
and artless. That is, it is not just that moods involve attending to different features but moods also
play a role in how we interpret them. A closely related and not entirely distinct issue is that it
seems like it is possible to pay attention to the very same features or objects and yet be in
different moods. We can spend a significant amount of time gazing at the street outside of the
window and be in any number of different moods while doing so.
But if moods are simply arrangements of particular objects or properties with a sprinkling
of effortful attention, it is hard to see how this could be the case.
I want to offer two explanations for this phenomenon.
One is that, in fact, when we look at these cases where we seem to be attending to the
same things but find ourselves in different moods, it is due to a difference in prior objects of
attention and/or a difference in one or more of the non-objectual parts of the pattern: sequence,
intensity, duration, or effort. These kinds of things work to determine how the present and future
objects of our attention are taken up. So, whether we think the bit of wordplay is funny or corny
will depend on what objects of attention came before but also the sequence, intensity, duration,
and effort of attending to the wordplay. So, moods develop not only by reinforcing the existent
patterns of attention but also by playing a role in what features we identify objects as having in
the first place.
The other explanation is less reductive and more satisfactory but also involves more
substantive ideas about what attention is. There are many types of attention. There is spatial
attention that involves attending to certain regions of space, object attention that involves
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tracking objects, as well as feature attention which involves tracking certain properties. And
that's just visual attention! We can attend via other senses and we can attend internally, to our
own thoughts and so on.
When we see objects and identify them, it seems that we identify them with particular
sortals and these sortals depend on two things: our broader mental states and the context. When
we are looking for places to sit, benches, chairs, sofas, and cushions all get sorted into one
category and jump out to us. When we are looking for cozy places to sit, we will group sofas and
armchairs and cushions together but not the others. Because in the first case we are simply
looking for a place to sit, we may well attend to the hardness of a bench but since the hardness
doesn't matter for our purposes, it will appear as a neutral property. In the latter case, we may
attend to the hardness of the bench and because of the way that our objects have been sorted, the
hardness will be attended to negatively.
The way I have described these instances so far makes it seem like it is our conscious
desires are doing the work here but this extends to desires of all stripes as well as our more
cognitive states. For example, I may not even realize that I am thirsty until I realize that drinks,
juicy fruit, and so on are looking particularly good to me. These items have been sorted out in
my mind before I had any sense of why. Or else, the fact that I think that Newt has bad fashion
sense can affect how the items that Newt wears are sorted in my mind—a piece I may have
sorted as positive on someone else, may, instead get sorted as negative.
There are multiple ways that we can cash out a view on which attention involves these
sortals. To give one example, Wayne Wu argues that what attention is is selection for action. So,
it seems to be an integral feature of attending that the object of attention is selected based on
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what is relevant in the context of our other mental states and, further, is selected as a member of
a particular class of objects or properties.
This is to say that when we are talking about the objects of attention in mood, we are not
talking about the objects themselves but also their contrast class. So, when we are thinking of the
objects that we attend to as part of our moods, we also need to see that paying attention is not
only about it or its properties but about the way that objects gets sorted based on our other mental
states.
Attention and, in turn, mood affects many of these mental states. The kind of desires that
become salient, the judgments we form in the mood, and the way we reason all change. All those
mental states then feed straight back into how we attend. Take the example from earlier.
Someone in a good mood will have a number of mental states that make it more likely that an
item will get sorted in attention in a positive way compared to someone in a bad mood. When
they then each hear the same joke (assuming they have the same level of liking that type of
humor), the person in a good mood is more likely to attend to the wordplay in the joke as
positive and may then infer that the joke must be good. Similarly, in cases where it seems like we
are attending to the same things but have different moods, I think frequently the explanation has
to do with the contrast classes of the objects they're attending to.

5.2 The Globality and Intentionality of Moods
As I already mentioned in Chapter 1, the large part of the philosophical literature about
moods concerns their intentionality—or apparent lack thereof. It comes, for the most part, from
two philosophical debates.
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On one hand, there are discussions of the distinction between emotion and mood. Beedie
et al.’s (2005) comprehensive study, which included both a survey of non-academic interview
participants as well as literature review of philosophical, psychological, and psychiatric texts,
showed that, aside from duration, intentionality and causation were the two most frequently
noted distinguishing features between moods and emotion. Unlike emotions, moods “have no
specific cause or direction” (Beedie et al., 2005, p. 863).
On the other hand, there is the debate in philosophy of mind about how to account for the
phenomenology of moods. Intentionalists argue that the phenomenal character of all experience
at least supervenes on what the experience represents—what its object is or what it is about.
Moods—seemingly lacking in intentionality as they are—have been regularly brought up as
potential counterexamples to the view.
The patterns of attention account is not unfriendly to intentionalist accounts. Moods are
simply particular patterns of attending to various features or objects. Since attention is intentional
—it has specific objects—we can see how the phenomenal character of mood could be argued to
supervene on the representations of the objects within the mood arrangement. It is beyond the
scope of this dissertation to analyze exactly how attention affects the phenomenal character of
our experiences. However, the foregoing discussion about sortals can help us see what I think
could be going on.
Our various mental states and the ways that our prior attendings helps determine the
sortals that apply to our attention in the moment. This has its own phenomenal character. How a
particular instance of attention feels depends on our other mental states and the character of the
foregoing instances of attention, transitions between attending from one thing to another, and the
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other aspects that create the pattern of attention. The phenomenal character of the mood, then,
could be argued to depend on the phenomenal character of these instances of attention building
on one another.
Our intuitions about the intentional content of moods, however, are deeply connected to
moods’ globality. In Chapter 1, I mentioned globality as one of the core features of mood. Moods
permeate much of our experience. They pervade how we think, what we think, what we do, how
we perceive and feel about the various parts of our life and environment. In a joyful mood, it is
not simply that some particular thing seems wonderful. It seems that many of the things that
come our way strike us as wonderful—or more wonderful than they would otherwise, anyway.
We think differently. Our memories acquire a different flavor. The future looks promising.
Indeed, many of the aspects of moods we have been discussing up until now all speak to this
feature of moods. Because of this, it seems like moods really aren’t directed at or about anything
at all. Whatever comes up ends up tinted by the mood.
Moods affect many aspects of our mental life but they don’t have to affect all of them. No
matter how good my mood, I am not inclined to think that various atrocities of the past were
wonderful to any degree. I am also not inclined to think of them as having been any less terrible.
No matter how lovely I feel, the mere thought I should pick up some groceries on my walk home
—a neutral thought—doesn’t have to strike me as any more positive than it usually does. So, to
explain globality, we need a Goldilocks view: one that explains how mood changes so many
parts of our experience but without us committing to moods changing everything.
Further, if moods represent anything, the thing they represent should presumably explain
the way moods modify all of these experiences. We want our story about moods’ intentionality to
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be suggestive of an explanation of globality. As Chomanski (2017) points out, this is a
particularly difficult task. For example, an account on which moods represent our overall state
have little to say about the way our experiences of the world are modified by the mood.
The patterns of attention account can provide just the kind of account of we need. The
nature of patterns itself, Chomanski argues, can help explain both the globality of moods and
their apparent intentionality.
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The very notion of a pattern suggests globality. In order to get something that looks like a
pattern rather than just a series at all, we need there to be similarities between the constituents.
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So, when we exhibit an anxious pattern, for example, there must be multiple objects in the
pattern that are tentative, dangerous, not assured, and so on. That said, we can have a pattern
among many different objects without every object having to fit the pattern. After all, even if
there is some background noise in the pattern, we can still have a pattern. So, just because I pay
some attention to a horrible piece of news while I’m in a good mood, I don’t need to be paying
attention to the pleasing features of the terrible event in order to count as exhibiting a good mood
pattern.
The notion of pattern can also explain the sort of strange positions of moods with respect
to intentionality. Think back to the DRM paradigm experiments we looked at in chapter 2. There,
Chomanski’s account of mood experience is importantly related to but unlike the patterns of attention
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view. Chomanski takes the experience of moods to be accounted for by patterned modification of our
non-mood states. Since attention patters are mood states on my account, the experience of moods has to
be accounted for by modifications in constituent parts of mood states as well as non-mood states.
On the patterns of attention account, there’s technically nothing that excludes an unpatterned (or close
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to unpatterned) series from being a mood. If, however, I am right that it is the patterned nature of a mood
that gives it distinctive phenomenology, then this should not be a problem. The closer a mood is to an
unpatterned series, the less distinctive phenomenology it will have. We know that many moods lack a
distinctive phenomenology and the most neutral moods seem like the candidates for being the least
patterned sequences of attention.
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we saw people presented with a list of words such as: table, sit, legs, seat, soft, desk, arm, sofa,
wood, cushion, rest, and stool (Roediger and McDermott, 1995). What the experiment showed
was that in later recall, participants were remarkably likely to remember “chair” as being on the
list. The question is, is this series of words about chairs? Is it about the individual objects in the
list? Is it about anything? This is a difficult question to answer, just as it is difficult to answer
what moods are about.
If the pattern of attention and its objects are coherent enough, I think we can identify the
target of a mood. Imagine Lilly is in a really long boring meeting or conference and it puts her in
a bored mood. As long as her attention focuses on the many aspects of the conference, we could
felicitously say that the Lilly’s boredom is about the conference. Most moods, however, do not
have contents that is quite so specifically targeted.
What this shows us is, as Chomanski (2017) says, is that “the peculiar, generalized
intentionality (if any) of moods is a special case of the peculiar, generalized intentionality (if
any) of patterned series in general” (p. 123). The patterns of attention account is, then, in an
excellent position to predict these features of moods.

6. Individuating Moods
One question concerning moods that has been particularly under-explored is the question
of how to individuate them. This can, at first, seem like a relatively unimportant question — as if
it might be a philosophical exercise with no obvious practical stakes. But in fact we cannot
answer the most basic questions about the nature of moods unless we have a robust idea of how
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we are going to tell moods apart. Depending on how we individuate moods, we must give
different answers to the question of when moods change or what causes them to change.
Take, for example, a view on which we consider someone who is in a slightly depressed
mood to be in the same mood as someone who is in a very depressed mood. Then, when
someone’s mood gets more depressed, we must say that their mood hasn’t, properly speaking,
changed. The phenomenology of these two people is likely to be different. So, we must then
conclude that the same mood can have different phenomenology. These are substantive
conclusions that would undoubtedly affect what views of moods we find plausible and how we
see moods fitting into our psychology more generally.
Below I outline a theory of mood individuation based on the patterns of attention
account.
6.1 Sorting Patterns
Even once we have ruled out some patterns of attention as mood patterns, there are a lot
of patterns left over. After all, the fact that the patterns of attention account counts the actual
pattern of attention means that we could talk about maximally specific mood patterns. For two
people to have the same maximally specific pattern would mean to have two instances of
someone attending to all the same things with the same duration, intensity, sequence, and amount
effort as someone else.
On this kind of precisification, no two people have likely shared a mood before. It just
seems incredibly unlikely that two people have ever paid attention to all and only the same things
in exactly the same ways. This is particularly unlikely, and probably impossible, given that
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attending to thoughts and memories is usually part of a mood pattern. It’s also unlikely that even
a single individual has ever experienced the exact same mood more than once. This is not meant
as a radical claim. Moods have a lot of nuance. It should not be surprising that my annoyed
moods are qualitatively different from each other and from your annoyed moods.
Talking about these very specific moods, however, is not very useful. We can’t
communicate about moods like that. Instead, we talk about good and bad moods, cheerful and
grumpy moods, playful, melancholy, equanimous or frustrated moods. We recognize the moods
of other people as ones they have had before, as ones we have had before.
The patterns of attention view can provide a useful reductive explanation of this broader
sense of mood. Maximally specified mood patterns can be more or less similar to each other
along a number of dimensions. Using these similarities, we can sort moods into as many
different kinds of groupings as we want. We could simply sort them on whether they make us
feel good, bad, or neutral. We can sort them based on what kind of attitudes and judgments they
engage. We can sort them based on behaviors associated with the mood. We can mix and match
our criteria to specify moods further.
On the patterns of attention view, as long as a carving up of patterns tracks genuine
similarities or dissimilarities, each way of sorting moods is metaphysically just as good as any
other. This explains why our mood vocabularies include words of very different specificity. A
playful mood is a more specific category than cheerful and cheerful is a more specific category
than good. Playfulness picks out an associated behavior (play). Cheerfulness picks out an
associated attitude (a positive attitude toward those around you and your situation). Good mood
picks out a feeling.
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Furthermore, while some carvings are rougher and some finer, we should not think of the
fine carvings as proper subsets of rough carvings. Of course, some are. It seems plausible, for
example, that cheerful moods are a proper subset of good moods. But many moods are not like
this. Most playful moods may be good moods, but there are bad playful moods as well. One can,
for instance, be playful in an aggressive or cruel way.
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The way I have described the various ways to draw similarities between moods can feel
somewhat arbitrary and, I think some of it is. However, our environment, our social status,
gender, and culture can change how we attend in systematic ways. So, there will also be
similarities between people’s mood based on these various features of their life. The fourth
chapter explores this idea in significant detail. There, I argue that, in fact, the flexibility of the
patterns of attention account is uniquely suited to explain why we do observe relatively minor
but systematic differences in the structure of moods between different groups and populations.
This is not to deny that some similarities in moods/patterns of attention are biological and
may serve particular adaptive functions. A number of influential theories of emotion incorporate
basic emotions. While there has been substantial debate in the psychology literature over the
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precise number of basic emotions, the main goal is to provide a list of universal emotions that
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have specific adaptive functional roles. It seems likely that there are universal moods with
adaptive functional roles as well.
This is not to say that good mood playfulness isn't sometimes objectively aggressive or cruel. Here I am
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referring specifically to playful moods that feel bad for the person in that mood.
For examples of such views see Prinz (2004), Griffiths (1997)
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Clore (2018, p. 16) puts the point quite vividly when he writes: “Over the years, theorists have
34
proposed two (Weiner & Graham, 1984), three (Watson (1930), four (Gray, 1982b), five (Oatley &
Johnson-Laird, 1987), six (Ekman et al., 1982), seven (McDougall, 1926), eight (Plutchik, 1980), nine
(Tomkins, 1984), ten (Izard (1971), or eleven basic emotions (Arnold, 1960).”
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For example, there seem to be systematic similarities between good moods and bad
moods aside from how they feel and there might be an adaptive reason for this. Studies have
demonstrated that positive moods make us better large picture thinkers—focusing on generalities
and the long-term—while negative moods make us more narrowly focused—paying greater
attention to minutia. The idea is that when we are in an environment that is perceived as safe, it is
advantageous for us to make bigger plans, take greater risks, and make broad changes. In an
environment perceived as unsafe or unstable, on the other hand, it is advantageous to slow down,
be more cautious, and make smaller adjustments (Wong, 2016). So, there is an argument for an
adaptive, functional explanation for the distinction between these two.
There is also likely to be an adaptive purpose to other moods as well. The kind of
epistemic advantages that I discussed in the previous chapter may well suggest an adaptive
explanation. Uncertain situations put us in anxious moods and, in an anxious mood, we are
quicker to attend to potential threats.
So, even though I do not think that there is a privileged carving up of the space of moods,
some similarities between patterns are bound to be more salient than others either because of our
biology or because of our social circumstances.
6.2 How Many Moods at a Time?
The fact that we can pick out different similarities between moods to identify them has
another interesting consequence. We can also have different carvings in terms of the number of
moods someone is in. There are more or less controversial versions of this claim. The simplest
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cases are trivial. If all cheerful moods are also good moods, then we could say that they are
simply in a cheerful mood or say that they are both in a cheerful mood and a good mood.
The patterns of attention view goes beyond this. First, we might be in both a playful and a
bad mood if our pattern of attention is both relevantly similar to other playful patterns as well as
relevantly similar to bad mood patterns. At the same time, we might simply say that they are in a
complex mood that is feisty. Consider a mood that one might be in after a major fight with a
loved one or a friend. On one hand, this mood pattern can be relevantly similar to both a sad
mood pattern and to a frustrated mood pattern. On the patterns of attention account of moods, it
is just as felicitous to say that it is a single relatively complex mood pattern and, therefore, a
single mood as it is to say that it is two distinct moods at the same time. Frequently, complex
moods—melancholy, for example—are not quite so easy to break down into component parts.
But as long as the relevant similarities in pattern can be observed, the patterns of attention view
does not limit us to a single mood at a time.

6.3 Who Has Moods?
Another advantage of thinking of moods as patterns of attention and individuating moods
more or less coarsely based on various similarities between patterns is that we can see how
moods don’t have to be limited to individual agents. On one hand, this could apply to inanimate
objects like landscapes, paintings, and, specifically, music. Unfortunately, this discussion is
beyond the scope of this dissertation. Here, I mean something much simpler.
Audiences, rallies, and parties can all sometimes have moods. Communities and towns
can have moods. Rooms of people can have moods. This is quite congruent with how we talk
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about and experience groups. Some of these kinds of group moods can be explained by the fact
that all or almost all the people involved are in the same mood. Indeed, people do tend to
gravitate their moods together. The phenomenon of people passively taking on moods from
others around them based on various cues is so common that mood contagion is an important
avenue of research in psychology.
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On the patterns of attention account, it is easy to explain how we can talk of an
overarching mood for the group. When most members are exhibiting similar patterns of
attention, we can look at the pattern of attention that encompasses the patterns of each
individual's mood and find that it exhibits that same pattern as well.
But what of the mood in a room where the people's moods are quite different? After all,
when we imagine the mood of larger and larger groups, it seems increasingly unlikely that there
would be a single majority mood that can be identified with the mood of the group. I think it is a
particular virtue of the patterns of attention view that it can allow us to talk about the mood of a
group in these more complicated cases as well.
Imagine a room where a number of people are waiting to take a test, to audition, or to
have an interview. Some are anxious. Some are psyching themselves up in anticipation. Some are
laser-focused. Some are frustrated. Does a room like that have a mood? I think that frequently it
does. That's a really tense room to be in. When we put together the patterns of attention exhibited
by the individuals, the pattern that emerges is not necessarily going to match any particular
See Clarkson et al. (2020) for a helpful review of the way that affective contagion takes place. One
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particularly intriguing study on mood contagion by Huntsinger et al. (2009), suggests that mood matching
can occur not only in person to person contact but also in anticipation of meeting someone whose mood
was reported to you. Similarly, a study by Hancock et al. (2008) suggests that mood contagion can take
place between people who are texting each other. People in a bad mood text in a particular way that the
recipient picks up on. Xu et al. (2015) suggest that mood contagion can also take place from the bodily
mood expressions of a robot.
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person's mood. However, since all the moods exhibit the pattern of attention associated with
tension, the overall mood will be a complex tense one.

7. Conclusion
What I have tried to do throughout this chapter is present a novel account of moods on
which patterns of attention are constitutive of moods. However, a number of questions remain.
For one, even though the account is that moods simply are patterns of attention, I have only
argued that patterns of attention are partly constitutive of moods. I have not yet argued that
patterns of attention are sufficient to account for moods.
Unfortunately, a full argument goes beyond the scope of this chapter. However, there are
a few things that emerge from the discussion so far that can suggest the direction that it would
take. First, we must identify what seems missing from a patterns-of-attention-only account and
the most natural thought is that it is the feeling of moods. There are a number of reasons to resist
adding feelings as constitutive of moods. First off, as I have already suggested in the
intentionality section, attention has its own phenomenology and there is no reason to think that
the phenomenology of attending in a certain pattern would not be quite complex. Second, certain
patterns of attention might cause or be caused by feelings. Finally, attention (and by extension,
moods) have a close connection to affective states that have their own phenomenology such as
desires, hopes, cares, concerns, and so on. I believe that these three sources of phenomenology
ought to be sufficient to account for the feel of moods without having to include feelings as part
of the view.
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Whether patterns of attention are sufficient for moods or not, one important feature that
emerges from this account is that there is an essential connection between our moods and our
environment. After all, the majority of objects of our attention are outside of ourselves. To be
sure, we can be so deep in our own heads that we fail to attend to our surroundings almost
entirely. Those moods are, indeed, almost fully internal. But most moods are not like this. Most
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moods are affected by our direct and indirect surroundings, the people around us and our
relationships with them, lighting, the weather, our economic and social situation, ambient noise,
and so on. This stands in stark contrast to the spirit behind the all too famous saying attributed to
Eleanor Roosevelt that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
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Sure enough, we are not powerless with respect to our moods. We can turn our attention
inward (a risky maneuver at the best of times). We can expend effort in forcing our attention to
certain things or into certain habits. We can change aspects of our environment or we can go to a
different environment. Sometimes. A lot of the time, however, we cannot do these things.
Sometimes we don't even realize what in our environment influences our mood.
I think this feature of moods—their externality—raises important ethical questions in a
variety of domains including philosophy of punishment, business ethics, and philosophy of
technology.
For example, if you confine someone to an environment that is barren of positive objects
of attention (say, prison) and they disobey rules or perform other actions associated with bad
Thank you to Nomy Arpaly for pointing this out.
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Arpaly (2006) points out that many therapists have identified feeling inferior as a major reason why
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people without diagnosed mental disorders seek therapy. She then asks us why it is that people pay so
much money to stop feeling inferior if they could simply refuse to consent to feeling that way (p. 94-5)
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mood, to what extent can you hold them responsible for this? Can putting someone in
circumstances that consistently force them into a bad mood be considered low-grade torture?
There are further questions that have to do with the permissibility of manipulating
people's moods. There are already documented cases of mood exploitation in social media.
Social media algorithms control what people see on their feeds. For a week in 2012, a number of
researchers manipulated what Facebook users would see on their feed. Specifically, they targeted
the valence of the messages people saw and analyzed if this had an effect on the emotional
valence of the posts those people made. That is, the researchers tried to see if they could use
these manipulated feeds as a way to induce mood contagion. They could. While having people
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read more negative messages is certainly an alarming instance of manipulation, realizing the
constitutive role of attention in moods highlights just how much manipulation can take place.
We have to ask ourselves to what extent companies that control large swaths of people's
attention are responsible for the moods that they produce in those people. It has been now a long
standing technique of major tech companies to create the kinds of work spaces that put people at
ease in a way that makes them stay at work beyond their regular work hours. Designing
workspaces essentially involves affecting the worker's attention: some of these decisions may
well be good but some may be exploitative.
We can only begin to answer these questions once we understand the connection between
moods and attention. I believe embracing the patterns of attention view of moods is a step in the
right direction.
The study by Adam D.I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock titled "Experimental
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evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" was published in 2014 in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors have been
extensively criticized for violating their subjects' informed consent.
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CHAPTER 4
V ARIETIES OF MOOD EXPERIENCE
1. Introduction
When a friend complains of a bad mood or boasts about a good mood, people usually feel
well placed to commiserate or cheer them on. After all, we know what it’s like to be in a bad
mood and we know what it’s like to be in a good mood. But how similar are our good moods
really? Do I get moods that you don't? Are there any moods I can't have but you can? To partly
answer these questions, we could turn to individual differences—everyone, is, after all, special.
But the question gets more interesting when we ask whether there might be mood differences
between particular groups of people. And indeed, the psychological literature suggests that such
differences do exist. This poses quite a challenge when we attempt to give an account of what
moods are. The right account has to be flexible enough to accommodate these kinds of
differences.
In this chapter, I argue that the patterns of attention account of moods is uniquely well-
situated to accommodate and explain these differences. This view presents an attractive way to
individuate moods that is similar to the way that we individuate colors.
To show that the account is flexible in the right ways I will focus on one particular type
of group variation in moods: culture. There are two advantages to concentrating on culture. For
one, it allows us to discuss a kind of variation that philosophers have brought up with respect to a
cousin of moods, the emotions. It will be helpful to see the ways in which talking about moods
presents an especially interesting challenge. The topic also helps us think about the constraints
we are faced with when coming up with a sufficiently flexible account. We want an account that
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is nuanced enough to explain the kinds of cultural differences in moods that have been
demonstrated. At the same time we want an account that doesn’t overshoot the data or
oversimplify the difference between people.
I will proceed in four stages. First, I will present some of the data that suggests cultural
variation in moods. This type of variation broadly concerns the causes, effects, valences, and
correlations between moods as well as mood vocabulary. Having outlined these types of cultural
variation, in section 3, I will examine whether existing theoretical frameworks may be able to
account for these sorts of variation. In particular, I will look at the valence/energy account of
moods that is prevalent in psychology and a modified version of a cognitivist explanation of
variation. I will argue that both of these views prove to be inadequate. Then, in section 4, I will
lay out how the patterns of attention view easily handles the exact types of cultural variation that
have been proposed in the psychological literature. Finally, I will explain how the patterns of
attention view can account for other types of systemic variation in moods that seem to occur.

2. Data for Cultural Variation in Moods
The way that moods vary across cultures is not part of our common understanding of
moods. Rather, we have to discover these differences through experiments and experience. And,
indeed, a number of studies have suggested that several kinds of systematic variations along
cultural lines do exist. Later, I am going to argue that it is a distinctive feature of my view that it
makes the right sorts of variations intelligible. But now I will present the kinds of systematic
cultural differences in moods that have been suggested in the psychological literature.
So what, then, are the kinds of cultural differences that appear among moods?
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Broadly, the available studies point to three kinds of cultural difference.
The first has to do with causes, effects, and relations between moods.
As far as causes, across cultures, which things will trigger a particular mood will differ.
For example, one study showed that between Caucasian, African-American, and Taiwanese
people, there is cultural difference about which type of music is most effective at putting them in
a calm mood (Good et al., 2000). Another study showed that crying induced different moods in
people, depending on their cultural background, their socio-political position in that culture, and
their gender identity (Becht and Vingerhoets, 2002).
As for effects of moods, seemingly the same mood may have different cognitive effects
on people depending on culture. A study showed that being in a good/bad mood had an effect on
the rate at which Swiss people perceived others to be sexually attracted to them while there was
no such observed effect in Malaysians (Goh et al., 2018).
As for the way that moods relate to each other, the same mood may correlate with other
moods and mental states in different ways. For example, there is some evidence that fatigued
moods correlate more strongly with clinical depression than anxious moods in Russians and
anxious moods correlate more strongly with clinical depression than fatigued moods in
Americans (Boyd et al., 2007). So, if you’re looking for warning signs of depression, it seems
there are cultural differences about what moods may constitute these signs.
A second type of cultural variation concerns the valence of a mood. Sometimes, the
difference lies in how positively or negatively people feel in a particular mood. In this case, we
have words that ostensibly point to the same mood such as the English "sleepy" and Japanese
"nemui" (which literally means "sleepy") actually seem to differ with respect to their hedonic
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tone: "sleepy" is perceived as a negative mood, while "nemui" is perceived as neutral (Watson et
al., 1984).
Finally, just like in the case of emotions, we have differences in mood vocabulary across
cultures. There are a couple different kinds of examples. On one hand, we have moods like
Russian toská. The word's closest English correlates are: sadness, boredom, and longing. It's a
kind of mood where things feel meaningless and not worth pursuing, yet one longs for something
one-knows-not-what. There seems no way to define this word in English without pointing to
several familiar English mood concepts and carving something out along unfamiliar lines within
that group as a separate concept.
On the other hand, we have moods like mono no aware, a Japanese concept. Though it is
a not a term that is much used outside of literature study now, it is the word intended to describe
the mood of many court poems in Heian Japan. They point to the feeling of seeing the
impermanence of all things and marveling at the transient beauty of the world. Rather than
spanning a wide range of moods familiar to Americans, it picks out a very particular narrow set
of bittersweet feelings.
3. Possible Solutions in Existing Accounts
Now that we have a sense of the kinds of cultural variations in mood that we have
evidence for, we are prepared to attempt to tackle it. But before I present my own view, let us
first look at the way that some existing theories fare with respect to these kinds of variations. In
particular, I want to address two views. The first is the very common but quite minimalist view
of mood that takes moods to be a matter of valence and energy levels. The second is an extension
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of a cognitivist view of emotions—a view that has been popular in part because of its apparent
ability to allow rich cultural variation in emotions—to moods. Looking at both of these views,
we see that generating a view that is both rich enough to distinguish the moods we tend to
distinguish and get the right amount of cultural variation can be surprisingly difficult.
3.1 Valence and Energy
Much of the current psychological work on mood relies on mapping moods on a grid.
First published in 1989, the affect grid is meant to help researchers assess people’s current mood
(Russell, et al., 1989). It is the view that moods are characterized by a certain level of energy or
arousal and a valence. So, roughly speaking, there are four basic moods: high energy negative
moods (as in irritability), low energy negative moods (as in melancholy), high energy positive
moods (as in cheerfulness), and low energy positive moods (as in serenity). Our everyday terms
for moods, in so far as they are referring to actual moods, are just groupings of points within this
valence/energy space.
In that sense, according to this view, all mood terms point point to equally real mental
states insofar as the terms pick out a space on the affect grid. When we learn that the term
“sleepy” picks out a certain kind low-energy neutral state for Japanese speakers and a low-
energy negative state in American English speakers, this doesn’t have to trouble us. Cultural
context can help us explain why certain combinations may be more common in some cultures—
perhaps low-energy states are more valued in Japanese culture, so low energy states that
otherwise seem very similar are more likely to be neutrally-valenced. So, when people report
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For some ways that culture-specific mood ideals and the expectations of others shape moods, see e.g.
39
Tsai et al, (2006) and Bastian et al. (2012).
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energy levels common of being sleepy, the valence of their feelings will be more likely to be
positive in Japan than in the US and, so, nemui will pick out a slightly different space on the
affect grid
The valence/energy view also allows that culture does not bar us from being able to
experience certain moods. All it takes to be in a mood is for your energy and valence to be within
the energy-valence zone picked out by the mood term. Your environment and culture may place
you into certain areas on the scale more often than members of other groups and, indeed, it might
be harder for members of some groups to occupy certain coordinates in the valence/energy space
but it doesn't claim that culture determines which moods we could have.
The problem with this view is that it achieves a successful account of cultural variation in
mood but only via scrubbing all the nuance off of moods more generally. A contemplative mood
is not really different from a serene or content mood—they’re all just low energy positively
valenced states. They may be slightly different in the range of energy or valence that they
include, but mostly they are all the same. Mono no aware may pick out a genuine mood but the
mood itself has nothing to do with appreciating impermanence—it just points to a range of states
you may be in when appreciating impermanence!
Consider again the Russian mood concept of toska. Nabokov ran into the problem of
trying to define toska in his translation of the Pushkin classic Eugene Onegin. In the comments
to his translation he says:
No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most
painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific
cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to
long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular
cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-
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sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom. (ed. Nabokov, 1964, p.
141)
Going back to our valence/energy field, it seems that toska covers an enormous range valence/
energy positions. It can vary from bittersweet/slightly positive, to extremely negative and from
the lowest possible activation to a storm of energy. Irritability, we must presume exists as a
subset of these valences/energy levels. But it is wrong to say that that anyone who is irritable is
also experiencing toska. Their irritability may have nothing to do with longing. On this view, we
account for cultural variation in moods by simply cutting out the aspects on which we take
moods to vary out of the equation. So, this will not do.
3.2 The Hope for a Cognitivist Account
If we want to bring more richness to moods, we may hope to tether moods closer to
judgments. Our judgments can be quite complex and so, by drawing a connection between
judgments and moods, we could get a large variety of complex states that actually track some of
the more nuanced ways we describe our moods. We may gain further hope from seeing that
cognitivism about emotions has been probably the most popular way to account for cultural
differences in emotions. As Martha Nussbaum says:
[T]aking up a cognitive/evaluative view makes it easy to see how society could
affect the emotional repertory of its members. If we hold that beliefs about what is
important and valuable play a central role in emotions, we can readily see how
those beliefs can be powerfully shaped by social norms as well as by an individual
history; and we can also see how changing social norms can change emotional life
(Nussbaum, 2001, p. 142).
We make different judgments of value from culture to culture. So, if our emotions are necessarily
tied to our judgments of value, it should be no surprise that we, for example, feel shame in
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different situations. We also make judgments using different value concepts. To some cultures,
honor matters. To some, it doesn’t. Some cultures have a concept of a particular emotion and
others do not. These different emotion-related concepts will figure in our judgments and, given a
cognitivist account, can explain why we will have differing emotional profiles depending on the
emotion-concepts present in our culture.
Cognitivism’s ability to explain cultural variation in emotions without having to posit
some deeper structural difference between people of different cultures provides support for the
cognitivist theory of emotions. So, when it comes to cultural variation in moods, it is important
for us to consider whether an analogous theory may be adopted here.
The main worry with trying to extend this account of moods is that, as I have already
pointed out, there is quite a bit of disagreement about what, if anything, serves as the object of
moods and what kind of attitudes they involve. It is, in turn difficult to see what kinds of
judgments may be involved with moods. Still, a lot of these theories do individuate moods based
on evaluative properties—whether these properties are part of the attitude or the content of the
mood.
Perhaps, we can explain cultural variation in moods by appeal to the evaluative concepts
available in a particular culture. So, Japanese people can feel mono no aware because they have
the relevant concept of enjoying the beauty of transient things.
Sure enough, having a particular concept makes the mood easier to have. We can strive to
be in this mood more often, we may notice more often when we are in this mood or identify as
fitting into that category. This is an indirect way that concepts can influence our moods.
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The problem with this approach is that the cognitivist explanation generates different
cultural differences than we seem to observe. That is, the cultural differences become
significantly more rigid. If it is the difference in concepts that allows us to have different moods
then we should not be able to have certain moods until we acquire the relevant concept. Or, at
least, it should be quite rare to feel the moods for which there is no concept in our culture. But
that is not what we observe. More often than not, when we learn about a mood like toská, we
find that the mood is not unfamiliar. One doesn’t need to have studied the Russian mood
vocabulary to recognize this mood expressed in F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Indeed,
I think it wouldn't be off-base to suggest that the book is about the shades of toská of the rich
New Yorkers in the 1920's.
Consider this passage when narrator Nick Carraway describes watching Gatsby:
…[H]e stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I
was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced
seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far
away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for
Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness
(Fitzgerald, 2004, p. 20-1).
The green light is an amorphous unreachable dream. Gatsby longs for Daisy, for happiness, for
the American dream. Gatsby is lonely, full of anguish and restless energy. Although Fitzgerald
was likely unfamiliar with the concept of toská, he masterfully conveyed it over and over again.
Moreover, if we look at the Russian translation of the novel, we actually find that the
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word "toská" shows up throughout the book. We see "wistful" translated as "toská" to describe
The primary translation consulted here is Evgeniya D. Kalashnikova's 1965 translation. However,
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Susanna Alukard's 2015 translation lends very similar results. Il'yin's 2016 translation contains only one
translation to toská and I was unable to access the three other extant translations. Kalashnikova and
Alukard's translations seem to be the most popular.
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Tom's chasing of his former football glory. Nick's "haunting loneliness" and the "haunting
loneliness" of the clerks of New York are toská as is Nick's "sinking" heart. The translation
describes Gatsby's "unhappiness", Daisy's "grieving," the "despair" of Daisy's letters, and the
"sadness" of the music at the club all as toská. Of course, this is only suggestive. Another person
may well not feel that toská is a fitting translation in those contexts. But it does indicate that the
reading on which The Great Gatsby expresses the mood of toská is easily available.
Let us consider another example. Take The Little Book of Hygge, the 2016 New York
Times bestseller by Meik Wiking. It describes the Danish mood concept hygge. On the very first
page of the introduction, Wiking writes:
It is about being with the people we love. A feeling of home. A feeling that we are
safe, that we are shielded from the world and allow ourselves to let our guard
down (Wiking, 2017).
In other words, hygge is a mood of cozy comfort, of feeling safe and warm. It is the mood of
curling up in a blanket with a cup of cocoa and listening to the storm outside. While he devotes
much of the book to describing what is or is not conducive to hygge, Wiking does not take
himself to be revealing anything new to people! This is a book about how to make hygge a
bigger part of your life, not to open you up to a mood you never knew before. The book simply
tells you what to buy, how to decorate, and how to spend time in a way that promotes hygge.
Indeed, the fact that hygge is not a novel feeling is one of the sources of critique of the
book. The most popular review of it on Goodreads rated the book one out of five stars. The
commenter says she sought the book out having heard about hygge on the radio and recognized
the feeling. Rather than getting helpful advice, however, she found that the book simply
marketed things she could buy to decorate her home in a hygge way (Lily, October 31, 2016,
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comment on Goodreads). Another reader commented in her review of the book: "Well, who
doesn’t enjoy the winter evening with a cup of cocoa or the fragrance of just baked cake?…I
mean, we all have been there, done that. Just didn’t realise it has a fancy, Danish name” (marta
(sezon literacki), February 11, 2017, comment on Goodreads).
The book does claim that the mood appears more frequently in Denmark but, according
to the book, it is because Danish people have put a lot of effort into cultivating their environment
to produce this feeling, not because they have the concept. So, if we want having particular
evaluative concepts to be the thing that explains cultural variation in mood, we are stuck. This
explanation simply does not fit the data for the kinds of variation that we observe.

4. The Patterns of attention account and mood variation
4.1 Individuating moods and colors
Recall that when we pick out a mood pattern of attention, each one is maximally specific.
It includes all the objects of attention in the pattern and all the other elements of the pattern.
Between all the potential objects of attention and ways of attending to them over varying periods
of time, we have millions of possible distinguishable moods on our hands. Although, at first
glance, this may appear problematic, it is in fact a wonderful feature of the view.
To see why, an analogy with color can be helpful.
Humans can discriminate between 2.3 and 7.5 million shades of color (Pointer and
Attridge, 1998). But we do not talk about each of them individually. We group them based on
similarity. Still, there are many different dimensions of similarity: we can sort colors by warm
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and cold, by saturation, or by proximity on a color wheel. Moreover, the cutoffs for color
groupings are vague and at least somewhat arbitrary.
Similarly, on the patterns of attention view, we’d expect that there are multiple
dimensions along which we can measure similarity of patterns and they can vary substantially
with respect to their fine-ness of grain. We can group the myriad of individual moods based on
certain characteristics.
One very rough grain dimension is whether attending in this way makes us feel overall
good or bad. This results in two moods: good moods and bad moods.
Going a little more fine-grained, we can group them based on similarity of body feeling.
This way we could talk about moods like nervous moods—characterized by running over the
same thought process over and over, fast heartbeat, increase in blood pressure, and various stress
hormones. Note that while this gives us more moods, we are not simply using our rough grain
divide and slicing the space up further. Nervous moods can be either good or bad like eager
anticipation on one hand and anxiety on the other. We could, of course, combine our criteria to
create an even finer distinction.
Yet another way to go more fine-grained is to sort moods based on what thoughts it’s
associated with. Here we can get a multitude of very different mood profiles like, say, precious
moods when everything feels like a gift or providence. Among those, we can further carve out
moods like mono no aware, where our attention is drawn to the preciousness and, at the same
time, impermanence of things.
The patterns of attention view allows us to distinguish moods based on multiple
dimensions of similarity. Every carving—as long as it picks out a genuine dimension of
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similarity—is equally legitimate even if some carvings may be more or less appropriate in
certain situations.
4.2 Cultural Variability in Moods and Colors
So, finally we arrive at explaining cultural variation. The great advantage of the patterns
of attention view lies in the fact that a myriad of different things affect how we attend. Indeed,
our cultural upbringing and our cultural environment have a great effect on how we attend. Just
to give one example, in a 2016 study, the researchers tracked how mothers from two different
cultures help little children model proper behavior when getting a gift (Kärtner et al, 2016). In
one culture, mothers focused more on maximizing positive affect and acknowledging the gift,
whereas in the other culture mothers prompted toddlers to acknowledge the giver more often.
These kinds of interactions tell us how we should attend to things and our life is full of such
interactions. Sometimes, our attention is intentionally drawn to certain aspects of our experience
as we see in the aforementioned experiment. More often than that, our culture models proper
attending to us more subtly or even unintentionally via modeling or performing certain acts of
attention. The very structure of our environment and society provides us with habits of attention.
Here again we can see parallels with color. It seems that the ways that cultures vary with
respect to their use of color is similar to the way that cultures vary with respect to how moods
vary and how we attend.
For example, we observe differences in what causes people to put on a particular color
and to react differently based on what color is worn. For example, if you are getting ready for
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your wedding, the color of the dress you choose will differ depending on your cultural
background.
How frequently certain color combinations show up—how colors correlate with each
other—in a person’s life is going to be culture-dependent. In central Illinois, orange and blue is
paired all the time. No matter whether you think it's aesthetically pleasing or not, it is a
combination that feels common, almost natural. But it only takes leaving the area (and not to an
area dominated by another orange/blue sports team) to realize that this combination is not that
common at all. Anyone could put dark blue and bright orange next to each other but outside of
certain cultural contexts, people may be much less likely to do so.
Similarly, we see how cultures may affect which things we tend to attend to at the same
time.
There are also differences in how positively or negatively certain colors are perceived.
For some time it was (and is occasionally still) seen as not masculine for men to wear pink in the
US. But this restriction is not universal and there are many cultures in which the behavior around
pink is not thus restricted.
How much people talk about or single out a particular color is culture-dependent.
Carolina blue means something to some people and nothing to others. The fact that something is
Carolina blue is going to jump out to people raised in North Carolina but it will not stand out as
anything but “blue” to others. The color goluboi will stand out to a Russian person but not to an
American. Thisis not because others don’t perceive these colors but they don’t single them out.
This is all to show that despite being real things, theoretically available to everyone, color
is nevertheless a culturally dependent thing. On the patterns of attention view, moods function
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like colors. They are real but the way we experience them and categorize them is culturally-
dependent.
For example, some culturally-loaded judgments, values, or environments can be more
conducive to certain kinds of patterns of attention. If your nation’s scholarly elite is steeped in
Buddhist thought which stresses the impermanence of things, they are then more likely to
experience a pattern of attention where attention is focused on the transience of things and how
precious they are given that transience. This experience being more common, there are cultural
reasons to designate this particular pattern with a word like mono no aware. But anyone, whether
they have any conception of Buddhist teaching or not, can experience this kind of pattern of
attention.
We are brought up—by our parents, our culture, our environment—to attend in particular
ways. This makes it harder or easier for us to have certain kinds of patterns, makes it more or less
likely that we do. But we can attend in all sorts of different ways.
This flexibility allows us to go beyond accounting for the existence of different mood
terms. It explains how the causes and effects of moods would differ, how they would correlate
with other states and how positive or negative their paradigm cases are. It is not so surprising that
we should observe moods that are, for the most part, the same across cultures with small kinds of
variations like how positive the mood is or what judgments we make when in a particular kind of
mood.
Recall, for example, that sleepy moods were rated as neutral in Japan but rather negative
in the US. The patterns of attention account can explain it by pointing out that although people in
both cultures would be largely attending to the same kinds of things, people in the US tend to
123
attend to more negative things. This can then be explained, perhaps, by the American cultural
association between sleeping and laziness that is not present in Japan. So, when children grow up
in the US and are sleepy, they may be told they are slacking off or being lazy, which then forms
an association between feeling tired and attending in some sort of negative way.
A related story can be told for the kinds of variations that come up in judgments. Recall
that Swiss people in a good mood judged themselves to be more attractive to others when in a
good mood than in a bad mood but there was no such effect in Malaysians. How we attend
affects the judgments we make. Because of media or people in their life modeling certain ways
of attending, some groups simply attend more to certain features in a good mood than in a bad
mood.
Indeed, on the patterns of attention view, these kinds of small but systematic variations
are what we should expect. Because our attention is affected by so many factors, we should
predict that our moods will vary with in small and specific ways that do not always have to do
with how we identify the mood itself. That is to say that a good mood will likely involve socially
dependent effects that have little to do with being positive or good because various features of
society will direct our attention in culturally-dependent ways when we are attending to the
positive aspects of the world.

5. Conclusion
What I have argued is that the patterns of attention account is uniquely suitable for
explaining the subtle but systematic differences between moods across cultures. However, there
is a broader phenomenon here. Culture is not the only thing that has been suggested to result in
124
small systematic differences in mood. The features of the account that allow us to understand
cross-cultural differences can help us understand these other differences as well!
For example, Martin (2003) showed that women preferred happy ads when they were in a
good mood and men preferred happy ads when they were in a bad mood. When the women were
in a bad mood and men in a good mood, neither group showed preference for sad or happy ads.
Similarly, Jaber and Hoogerhyde (2019) showed that women rated goods as more luxurious
when in a good mood and men rated goods as more luxurious in a bad mood.
These differences are difficult to explain for other accounts of mood because the
connection between the mood and the effect is so opaque. Even if they can distinguish between
men and women's moods, they have a tough time explaining why there would be such a small
systematic difference.
The patterns of attention view, however, does offer not only a mechanism for these
differences but an explanation as well. While good and bad moods for men and women involve
attending, on the whole, in similar ways, various factors about the different ways boys and girls
are brought up can affect how they attend in particular situations which in turn means that their
moods will exhibit minor but systematic differences.
The richness and explanatory power of the patterns of attention account provides a
powerful reason for us to take this view seriously.
125
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Moods affect almost every aspect of our daily experience. They affect how the world appears to us, how we form beliefs, and how we process information. They change how we feel (mentally as well as physically), what we remember, what strikes us as important, and what motivates us. Some moods make it easy to be kind and generous while others make it more difficult. Moreover, they do all this while remaining largely in the background of our experience. My dissertation develops a new account of moods. The view is that moods are constituted by patterns of attention. When we are in a serene mood, we attend to different things than when we are in melancholy mood, or a frustrated mood, or a chipper mood. Some of this is voluntaryㅡwe focus on different aspects of ourselves and our environmentㅡbut much is involuntaryㅡsome things just capture our attention. I argue that this view of moods as patterns of attention allows us to account for many things, including: how moods can respond to our beliefs, how moods can have moral, epistemic, and practical roles, and how there can be variation in moods across cultures. I lay the view out in three stages. In the first part, I tease out some features of mood that have not been previously recognized in the philosophical literature. In the second part, I lay out my patterns of attention account. Finally, in the third part, I provide an application that shows how fruitful embracing the patterns of attention view can be.

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Creator Kostochka, Tatyana Aleksandrovna (author)

Core Title Capturing moods: a philosophical exploration

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Philosophy

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 11/24/2021

Defense Date 09/28/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag affect,attention,cross-cultural,Emotions,epistemic role of moods,mood differences,mood effects,moods,Morality,OAI-PMH Harvest,patterns of attention

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schroeder, Mark (committee chair), Arpaly, Nomy (committee member), Levin, Janet (committee member), Meeks, Lori (committee member), Wedgwood, Ralph (committee member)

Creator Email kostochk@usc.edu,tkostochka@protonmail.com

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Rights Kostochka, Tatyana Aleksandrovna

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