网范文：“Concerts and modularity of mood” 情绪通常被认为是与情感现象的某些性质,但不同于情感。例如,情绪通常认为是一段时间,持久几小时,几天甚至几周。这篇心理范文讲述了情绪的定义。情绪也普遍认为是建立许多小事件的起因,它是由一个较大的刺激引起，英语论文，并不是每个人都满意这个现象。通过引用各种观点来支持他的论点,但它并不需要这样的学术著作，英语论文范文，找到支持他的主张,作为一个简短的标准领域，这里可以表明,在当代心理学情绪不是一个重要的概念。
纳森可能对当代心理学的倾向在淡化情绪的影响,但这并不意味着情绪与情感区别是无效的。有效性的区别由概念发展和实证探讨。只有在过去二十年里,情绪已成为心理学家关注的焦点。下面的范文对这一观点继续论述。
Introduction
Moods are commonly thought to share with emotions certain general properties of affective phenomena, but to differ from emotions in a number of specific parameters. For example, moods are usually thought of as relatively long-term states, lasting for hours, days or even weeks rather than minutes or seconds. Also, moods are generally thought to build up gradually as a result of many small incidents, in contrast with emotions, which are caused by a single powerful stimulus (Ekman, 1994; Parkinson, Totterdell et al., 1996: 6).
Not everyone is happy with this distinction. Randolph Nesse, for example, has argued that the distinction is not an important one, and claims that it is not routinely accepted in philosophy and even less accepted in psychology (Nesse, 1992). Nesse cites various authorities to support his contention, including Lazarus (Lazarus, 1991), though it is hardly necessary to go to such scholarly works to find support for his claim, as a brief perusal of any standard undergraduate textbook in the field suffices to show that mood is not a significant concept in contemporary psychology. In one standard text, the term 'mood' is not even listed in the index (Gross, 1996), while in another, the entry reads simply 'Moods: see Emotions' (Atkinson, Atkinson et al., 1996).
Nesse may be right about the tendency of contemporary psychology to downplay the mood-emotion distinction, but this does not mean that the distinction is invalid. The validity of the distinction will not be determined by a show of hands, but by conceptual advances and empirical research. It is only in the last two decades that mood has become a focus of attention among psychologists, and it is not surprising that this work does not yet constitute orthodox opinion nor appear in the standard textbooks.
One of the reasons why Nesse and others are sceptical of the validity of the mood-emotion distinction is that the distinguishing criteria most often cited are merely quantitative. If moods differ from emotions only in their duration and in the number and intensity of stimuli, then perhaps emotions and moods are, at bottom, the same thing, and this thing varies continuously along these parameters. In this case, dividing these continuous parameters in two would be an arbitrary decision. This kind of consideration has prompted a number of theorists to propose qualitative criteria for distinguishing moods from emotions. William Morris, for example, has argued that emotions provide consciousness with information about the environment while moods provide information about the self (Morris, 1992). More precisely, Morris argues that emotions tell the conscious system that 'something is going wrong or going well with the external situation, whereas mood tells us that our personal resources are insufficient for dealing with current demands or exceed what is required of us' (Parkinson, Totterdell et al., 1996: 7 emphasis in original). This distinction is problematic because whether something is going well or badly usually depends on the relationship between personal resources and environmental problems rather than on one or the other. If we are unhappy because we are hungry and have no food to eat, for example, this is because of a combination of low personal resources (low blood glucose) and an environmental deficit (no food is at hand).
Perhaps a more promising distinction is provided by Richard Davidson, who has proposed that emotions modulate or bias action, while moods modulate or bias cognition (Davidson, 1994). Davidson's distinction is reminiscent of the classic distinction made by Vincent Nowlis, who suggested that emotions are lower-order dispositions and moods are higher-order dispositions; emotions are dispositions to act in particular ways, while moods are dispositions to have particular emotions (Nowlis, 1963). Like Nowlis, Davidson implies that moods can alter the probability that particular emotions will be triggered, but unlike Nowlis he does not rule out the possibility that the causal arrow can point in the other direction too (emotions can also induce particular moods). Nor does Davidson's distinction limit the function of moods to their capacity to induce emotions, as Nowlis does. On the contrary, Davidson sees this capacity as part of a much broader function, which is to alter information-processing priorities and to shift modes of information-processing; 'mood will accentuate the accessibility of some and attenuate the accessibility of other cognitive contents and semantic networks', he claims (Davidson, 1994). It is only in virtue of this broader function that moods have the capacity to lower the threshold for arousing particular emotions. People in an irritable mood will become angry more readily than usual because they 'construe the world around them in a way that permits, if not calls for, an angry response' (Ekman, 1994: 57).
Ekman echoes Nowlis and Davidson in claiming that moods are dispositions to have certain emotions, though like Davidson he does not take this to be the defining or the only criterion for distinguishing moods from emotions (Ekman, 1994). He also claims that emotions have their own unique facial expression while moods do not, and that emotions that occur during a mood are more intense, less controlled and decay more slowly than those that do not.
Nico Frijda proposes a distinction between mood and emotion based on a distinction that Hume draws between the object of an emotion and its cause. Hume conceived of emotions as intentional states, meaning that they involved representations 'about' something, and claimed that the intentional object of emotion could differ from the cause of the emotion. For example, the cause of one's anger may be an insult, while the object of the anger might be the person who insulted you. Frijda proposes that moods differ from emotions in lacking an object. Moods are thus defined as 'noninentional affective states' (Frijda, 1994). This is reminiscent of Freud's distinction between fear and anxiety. Freud argued that fear is focused on a specific object while anxiety 'has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object' (Freud, 1926: 325). This distinction has since become an accepted staple of psychiatric wisdom, in which it is now common to distinguish between phobias, which involve fears of specific objects, and anxiety states, which are 'not attributable to real danger or focussed on any particular stimulus (i.e. "free floating anxiety")' (Hughes, 1991: 48). Frijda's distinction is also consistent with the view of many theorists that moods are more 'diffuse' and 'global' than emotions (Morris, 1989).
As this brief survey of the literature reveals, there is no consensus about what moods are. There are a number of well-entrenched folk-psychological notions about moods, but these do not amount to a theory. The conceptual work on mood has consisted of little more than each researcher picking on one of these notions and pitching it against rival theorists who emphasise a different one. No one stops to ask whether these various aspects are produced by a single psychological mechanism or by several. Perhaps this is because researchers have lacked a good over-arching theory of the mental in which the question can be properly framed. I propose that evolutionary psychology provides such a theory, and has already proved its theoretical utility in explaining affective phenomena by relating Ekman's six basic emotions to six mental modules. The question is whether the same can now be done for mood phenomena.
The modularity of mood
Unlike basic emotions, moods do not seem like promising candidates for modular realisation. The very properties that are held to distinguish moods from emotions are precisely those that would indicate lack of modularity. For example, the 'global' effects of mood in altering information processing modes and memory across many different domains seems to argue against moods being inaccessible to other mental processes. Likewise, the idea that moods might be much less specific with regard to the nature of the stimulus suggests that they are more domain-general than is consistent with the notion of modularity. Moods are not always subject to conscious control, and so they do seem to have some degree of informational encapsulation, but there is evidence to suggest that moods are more easy to regulate than emotions, which implies that they are less encapsulated (and so less modular) than emotions. No one has found a specific neural structure associated with any particular mood; indeed, the only serious neurological theory of mood, the so-called 'catecholamine hypothesis', suggests that moods are associated with levels of neurotransmitters that are widely dispersed throughout the brain (Schildkraut, 1965; Panksepp, 1982).1
On the other hand, moods do show characteristic breakdown patterns, as is evident from the fact that psychiatrists have long recognised a class of disorders that they refer to as 'mood disorders'. These disorders are characterised by moods that are of greater intensity and longer duration than normal. However, the mere fact that some mental phenomenon exhibits a characteristic breakdown pattern is certainly not very strong evidence for the modularity of the phenomenon in question. Even the broader conception of modularity favoured by evolutionary psychology regards modularity as a cluster of properties; the possession of a single modular property is not sufficient to make the system modular, least of all the possession of a less important modular property such as having a characteristic breakdown pattern.
Nevertheless, attending to the breakdown patterns of various moods might suggest another strategy for investigating the links between moods and modules. For while there are, as yet, no evolutionary theories of normal mood, there are, as we have seen, a number of evolutionary theories of abnormal mood. These theories all presuppose an implicit theory of normal mood. This suggests that we might begin an investigation of the possible modular basis of normal mood by turning to the alleged modular basis of certain mood disorders. This is not as strange as it may sound. There have been many cases in which the first evidence for the existence of a given module came from a disorder. Indeed, this strategy forms the principal methodological tool of cognitive neuropsychology. It has also been prominent in evolutionary psychology. The theory of mind module, for example, the existence of which is supported by much non-clinical evidence now, was first postulated as part of a theory of autism in which it was argued that autistic symptoms result from a breakdown in this module (Baron-Cohen, 1995).
The social competition hypothesis of depression (Price, Sloman et al., 1994), the defection hypothesis of postnatal depression (Hagen, 1998; Watson and Andrews, 1998), and the reciprocal altruism hypothesis of dysthymia (McGuire, Fawzy et al., 1994) can all be construed as attributing depressive symptoms to the function or malfunction of certain hypothetical modules. The social competition hypothesis attributes depressive symptoms to the operation of a social comparison module. The defection hypothesis attributes the symptoms of postnatal depression to the operation of a module that evaluates the viability of newborn babies. The reciprocal altruism hypothesis attributes the symptoms of dysthymia to a malfunction in the modules associated with social exchange or to mistaken information in some non-proprietary store. Perhaps these three modules are all that we need to account for normal mood phenomena too.
In fact, it would be far too strong to claim that these three modules are all that we need to account for normal mood phenomena. For a start, there are many factors that cause low mood that do not seem to lie within the domain of any of the three modules in question. For example, bad weather and social isolation are both thought to cause low mood, yet neither of these factors is relevant to social comparison, the viability of newborn babies or reciprocal altruism. Furthermore, there are other moods apart from what I have called 'low' mood; euphoria, anxiety and irritability are usually regarded as moods as well (Ekman, 1994). While euphoria might conceivably be caused by the same modules as low mood, it seems far less likely that anxiety and irritability would also be due to these modules. Thus while the three modules discussed above may play an important part in some kinds of low mood and possibly also in some kinds of euphoria, it seems very likely that other modules are involved in other kinds of low mood and euphoria and still other modules in anxiety and irritability. It may be the case that mood phenomena also involve non-proprietary stores of information in addition to specific modules. This would seem likely in view of the allegedly 'global' and 'diffuse' effects of mood on cognitive processing.
All this suggests that 'mood' will turn out to be a massively heterogeneous category from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. It is not just the case that different moods will be subserved by different modules, as is the case with the various basic emotions. Rather, each mood may be subserved by a variety of different modules and non-proprietary stores, unlike, say, the emotion of fear, which may be subserved by a single predator-avoidance module.
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