Affect is the immediate, apparent emotional state. Mood is aligned with personality and is the more enduring, pervasive emotional state. ‘Observed’ or ‘objective’ mood is sometimes used interchangeably with affect.
Abulia: loss of volition/decisiveness.
Alexithymia: impaired ability to describe one’s emotions.
Anhedonia: impaired ability to enjoy activities that would normally be pleasurable.
Anosodiaphoria: emotional indifference to disease.
Anxiety: an unpleasant feeling of anticipatory tension.
Apathy: loss of motivation.
Asthenic: the common interpretation of this term is ‘inadequacy’ (weak-willed, hypochondriacal, prone to complaining) as one of Schneider’s 10 psychopathic personalities.
Belle indifference: dissociation of affect in which the subject appears indifferent to their malady.
Blunting/flattening of affect: degree of emotional expression is diminished. Sometimes used interchangeably with restricted affect.
Cyclothymia: subject’s mood cycles ‘up and down’ over a period of time. Swings are not as extreme as those of bipolar disorder.
Delusional mood/atmosphere/intuition (also apophanous mood or Wahneinfall): a pervasive and compelling sense of being on the verge of some personally significant (and usually sinister) knowledge or event, often relieved by the onset of a delusion.
Dysphoria: unpleasant mood.
Elation/euphoria: abnormally high affect or mood.
Euthymia: neutral mood (i.e. no deviation of mood such as elation, depression, anxiety etc.). Often used to denote ‘normal’ mood.
Guarded: subject feels interrogated on interview and is reluctant to give information. A degree of paranoia is usually implied.
Incongruity of affect/mood: inappropriate dissonance between an individual’s mood and their circumstances or topic of conversation.
Lability of mood: mood tends to fluctuate with unusual rapidity. Extreme lability of mood with total loss of emotional control is termed emotional incontinence.
Moria/Witzelsucht: fatuous affect; apathy and silliness combined with general indifference (typically as a result of frontal lobe dysfunction).
Perplexity: a psychotic subject appears to have the vague and troubling experience that something may be wrong with them. Possibly indicates a degree of insight on the periphery of their awareness too subtle for them to grasp.
Restricted affect: the number of emotional responses is diminished. Often used interchangeably with blunting of affect.
Verstimmung: ill-humored mood state (‘moodiness’). Associated depressive symptoms may ‘rub off ’ on others, making them unhappy as well.
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