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Difference between mood and affect
The terms mood and affect are sometimes used to represent the patient’s subjective (reported emotional feelings) and objective (observed emotional expression), respectively.
However, the DSM describes both mood and affect as emotional feelings with objective and subjective components and differentiates them temporally—whether the emotion is persistent (days to weeks) or temporary (seconds to hours), respectively.
Thus, mood is the persistent “emotional climate,” and affect is the transient “emotional weather.”
This use more appropriately describes the phenomenology of emotion and helps to distinguish mood disorders from affect disorders.
For example, the colloquial “mood swings” occurring over seconds to hours are better described as affective lability.
Sources
- Yeung AS, Chang TE: Psychiatric epidemiology. In Stern TA, Fava M, Wilens TE, Rosenbaum JF (eds): Massachusetts General Hospital comprehensive clinical psychiatry. London: Elsevier, 2016, p 663.
- Sadock BJ, Sadock VA, Belkin GS (eds): Kaplan & Sadock’s pocket handbook of clinical psychiatry, 5th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2010, p 143.
