ABNORMALITIES OF MOOD /EMOTION

• Feeling: a positive or negative reaction to some experience
• Emotion: a stirred up state due to physiological changes which occurs as a response to some event and which tends to maintain or abolish the causative event.
• Mood: the pervasive feeling tone which is sustained (lasts for a length of time) and colours the total experience of the person.
•  Affect: is the outward objective expression of the immediate cross-sectional emotion at a given time.
• Euthymia: a normal mood state, neither depressed nor manic.
• Cheerfulness: being in good spirits.
• Perplexity: a state of puzzled bewilderment.
• Anxiety: feeling of apprehension accompanied by autonomic symptoms (such as muscles tension, perspiration and tachycardia), caused by anticipation of danger.
• Free-floating anxiety: diffuse, unfocused anxiety, not attached to a specific danger.
• Fear: anxiety caused by realistic consciously recognized danger.
•  Panic: acute, self-limiting, episodic intense attack of anxiety associated with overwhelming dread and autonomic symptoms.
•  Phobia: irrational exaggerated fear and avoidance of a specific object, situation or activity.
• Agrophobia: patients rigidly avoids situations in which it would be difficult to obtain help.
• Social phobia -  Intense and excessive fear of being observed by other people
  • E.g eating or drinking in public or talking to the other member of sex
• Specific phobia: irrational fear of a specific object or stimulus.
  • Acrophobia: fear of heights
  • Arachnophobia: fear of spiders
  • Claustrophobia: fear of closed spaces
  • Gamophobia: fear of marriage
  • Hemophobia: fear of blood
  • Zoophobia:  fear of animals
• Agitation: severe feeling of inner tension associated with motor restlessness.
• Irritable mood: easily annoyed and provoked to anger.
• Dysphoria: mixture feelings of sadness and apprehension.
• Depressed mood: feeling of sadness, pessimism and a sense of loneliness.
• Anhedonia: lack of pleasure in acts which are normally pleasurable.
• Diurnal variation: a variation in the severity of symptoms  (mood) depending on the time of the day
• Grief: sadness appropriate to a real loss (e.g. death of a relative)
• Guilt: unpleasant emotion secondary to doing what is perceived as wrong.
• Shame: unpleasant emotion secondary to failure to live up to self-expectations.
• Perplexity: anxious mood with bewilderment.
• Ambivalent Mood: coexistence of two opposing emotional tones towards the same object in the same person at the same time.
• Alexithymia: inability to, or difficulty in, expressing one’s own emotions.
• Elevated Mood: a mood more cheerful than usual.
• Elevated Mood:
  • Euphoria (Stage I): mild elevation of mood in which feeling of elevated mood with optimism and self-satisfaction not keeping with ongoing events. Usually seen in hypomania.
  • Elation (stage II):  (Moderate elevation of mood)  - a feeling of confidence and enjoyment, along with increased PMA. –a  feature of manic illness
  • Exaltation (stage III): (severe elevation of mod):  intense elation with delusions of grandeur, seen in severe mania.
  • Ecstasy (Stage IV): (very severe elevation of mod):  a sense of extreme well-being associated with a feeling of rapture, bliss and grace. typically seen in delirious and stuporous mania
• Expansive Mood: expression of euphoria with an overestimation of self-importance.
• Grandiosity: feeling and thinking of great importance (in identity or ability).
• Constricted Affect: significant reduction in the normal emotional responses.
• Flat affect: absence of emotional expression.
• Apathy: lack of emotion, interest or concern, associated with detachment.
• Labile Affect: rapid, abrupt changes in emotions in the same setting, unrelated to external stimuli.
• La Belle Indifference: inappropriate denial of expected affect and lack of concern about physical disability (seen in conversion disorders).
• Inappropriate Affect: disharmony between emotions and the idea, thought, or speech, accompanying it.
• Cyclothymia: There is cyclical mood variation to a lesser degree than in bipolar disorder.

References

1. Psychiatry, Third Edition. Edited by Allan Tasman, Jerald Kay, Jeffrey A. Lieberman, Michael B. First and Mario Maj. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2008.
2. Sims, A. Symptoms in the Mind: An Introduction to Descriptive Psychopathology (3rd ed). Elsevier, 2002.
3. Fish, F. Clinical Psychopathology, Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry. Bristol: J. Wright & Sons. 1967.

Posted in: Mental Health Nursing,Psychology