Cognition, Mood, and Temperament

Cognition, Mood, and Temperament: How Thoughts and Feelings Steer Each Other

The EPPP tests one big idea here from many angles. What you believe changes how you feel and act. How you feel changes what you notice, remember, and believe. The traps live in look-alike terms, so that is where we slow down.

Why This Matters for Psychologists

One client says, "Nothing I do matters." Another can't stop replaying a breakup. A third was a shy toddler and is now a socially anxious teen. Knowing the link tells you what to target: the belief, the thinking habit, the attention pattern, or the context.

Four Words, Four Time Scales: Affect, Emotion, Mood, Temperament

In research, affect is the umbrella term: any experience of feeling or emotion, mild or intense, normal or pathological.

Emotion is relatively intense and happens in response to something. It has an object: you are angry at someone or afraid of something.

Mood is longer and less intense. It needs no specific trigger, and you may not consciously notice it. It can last hours, days, or weeks.

Temperament is the basic foundation of personality, usually seen as biologically based and present early in life. It includes energy level, emotional responsiveness, and behavioral inhibition.

Positive and negative affect can be brief states, longer states, or stable traits.

Think of the ocean. An emotion is one wave. A mood is the tide. Temperament is the coastline that shapes how big the waves get.

Trap: Affect vs. Mood in the Clinic

DSM-5's glossary defines affect as the observable expression of a feeling, which changes moment to moment. Mood is a pervasive, sustained emotion that colors how the person sees the world (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). On a mental status exam, the client reports mood; you observe affect, including whether it fits the stated mood. Affect is the weather you see out the window today. Mood is the climate the client lives in. A client who says "I'm fine" while crying shows affect that doesn't match stated mood. Classic affect labels: flat or blunted (schizophrenia), restricted (depression), and labile (mania).

Cognitive Models: Beliefs Shape Mood and Behavior

Beck: Schemas, the Triad, and Biased Processing

Beck said depression-prone people carry depressive schemas: deep mental templates built around loss, failure, rejection, worthlessness, and inadequacy. Schemas often form in childhood after hard experiences and lie dormant until stress switches them on. Then they produce negative thoughts about the self, the world, and the future, the cognitive triad.

Cognitive biases keep the cycle going: focusing on negatives, interpreting events negatively, and blocking positive memories. Someone with a rejection schema notices a friend's frown, reads it as rejection, and instantly remembers every past snub. One schema bends attention, interpretation, and memory at once. This is a diathesis-stress model: a negative thinking style plus life stress predicts depression over time.

Ellis: The ABC Model

Albert Ellis founded rational emotive therapy, later renamed rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). His ABC model says an Activating event does not directly cause the emotional Consequence. The Belief about the event does. Two people get no reply to a text. One thinks, "They're busy," and moves on. The other thinks, "I always get ignored," and feels low all night. Same A, different B, different C. Therapy techniques live in the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapies lesson.

From Learned Helplessness to Hopelessness

The exam loves the order of these revisions.

Learned Helplessness: The Dog Studies

Seligman and Maier (1967) used a triadic design. One group of dogs could end each shock by pressing a panel. A yoked group got matched shocks, but nothing it did changed them. A third group got no shock. The next day, in a shuttle box where jumping a barrier ended the shock, typically about two-thirds of yoked dogs failed to learn to escape. About 90% of the other two groups learned easily (Maier & Seligman, 2016).

Matched shocks, but only the group without control gave up. The key variable is uncontrollability, not shock. Seligman called this learned helplessness: the animal learns that outcomes don't depend on its responses. He proposed it as a model of depression.

Maier and Seligman (1976) described three deficits:

• Motivational: fewer attempts to escape
• Cognitive: trouble learning later that a response does work
• Emotional: more fear and distress

The Reformulated Model: Attributions (1978)

Abramson, Seligman, and Teasdale (1978) rebuilt the model for humans with attribution theory. They split universal helplessness (nobody could control this) from personal helplessness (others could, but I can't). People explain why outcomes don't depend on their actions, and each dimension predicts something different:

People who explain bad events with internal, stable, and global causes tend to develop depressive symptoms when negative events hit (Peterson & Seligman, 1984). Explanatory style in full lives in the causal attributions lesson.

Hopelessness Theory (1989)

Abramson, Metalsky, and Alloy (1989) proposed hopelessness as a proximal, sufficient cause of a subtype they called hopelessness depression. Hopelessness means expecting bad outcomes to happen, or good ones not to, with nothing you can do about it. It grows from seeing negative events as having stable and global causes, plus concluding the event says something bad about your future and self-worth.

Update: Passivity Is the Default (2016)

For the exam, the classic answer above stands. The update: Maier and Seligman (2016) wrote that the original theory "got it backward." Passivity after long, uncontrollable shock is the unlearned default, driven by serotonin activity in the dorsal raphe nucleus. What animals learn is control: the medial prefrontal cortex detects control and shuts the passivity down. Picture a car that sits in park by default. Parking isn't learned. Driving is.

Control Beliefs Compared

The exam will try to blur these three control beliefs.

Locus of control (Rotter, 1966) is a generalized expectancy about who controls your outcomes. Internals credit their own effort. Externals credit other people, luck, or chance. Internals tend to do better in school, cope better, and report less depression.

Self-efficacy (Bandura) is confidence in your ability to do a specific task. You can feel sure of yourself running a group session but shaky doing your taxes. Bandura (1977) split two beliefs:

• Efficacy expectation: "Can I do this behavior?"
• Outcome expectation: "If I do it, will it get the result?"

A client may believe exercise eases anxiety (high outcome expectation) yet doubt she can get to the gym (low efficacy expectation). Efficacy expectations predict whether you start coping, how hard you try, and how long you persist. Bandura named four sources:

1. Mastery experiences (performance accomplishments): succeeding yourself
2. Vicarious experiences: watching others succeed
3. Verbal persuasion: being told you can do it
4. Physiological and affective states: what your body and feelings signal

Mastery experiences are the most influential source, because they rest on your own successes (Bandura, 1977, 1997).

Perceived control also predicts health. British civil servants in low-control jobs had higher rates of heart disease than those with more say over their work (Marmot et al., 1997).

How Mood Changes Thinking

Beck runs the arrow from belief to mood. Now reverse it.

Mood and Memory: Three Look-Alike Terms

Alcohol's state-dependent effects showed up in recall but not recognition (Goodwin et al., 1969). Mood-dependent memory is most likely when people generate both the memories and the cues themselves (Eich et al., 1994). In depressed mood, recalling more negative material is a reliable finding (Gaddy & Ingram, 2014).

Mood-congruent memory works like a playlist filter. A sad mood doesn't just change the song playing now. It changes which songs the shuffle picks next.

Affect as Information: The Weather Study

Schwarz and Clore (1983) interviewed people on sunny or rainy days. People in a bad mood rated their whole lives as less happy and satisfying. But when people were led to pin their bad feelings on a passing outside cause, the bad-mood effect vanished. Good moods did not change.

This is affect as information: people consult their feelings as data when judging something big. Once the weather explains the gloom, the gloom stops counting as information about your life.

Know the replication story: nine larger replications found mostly nonsignificant effects, and the significant ones were much smaller (Yap et al., 2017).

The Affect Infusion Model

Forgas's (1995) affect infusion model (AIM) asks when mood seeps into judgments. It names four strategies: direct access, motivated, heuristic, and substantive processing. Heuristic and substantive judgments absorb more mood than direct-access or motivated ones.

Attention and Interpretation Biases in Anxiety

Emotional Stroop: People name the ink color of words. Patients are often slower on words tied to their clinical concern (Williams et al., 1996). A person with a spider phobia stalls on the color of the word "WEB."

Dot-probe: A threat word and a neutral word appear at once in two screen spots, then a probe appears in one spot. Clinically anxious people found probes faster near threat words, so attention had moved toward threat (MacLeod et al., 1986).

A meta-analysis of 172 studies found this threat bias across anxious groups but not in nonanxious people, with d = 0.45 (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). The classic summary: anxiety biases attention toward threat, while depression shows more of a memory bias for negative material (Mineka & Sutton, 1992). Caveat: baseline dot-probe scores from 1,005 clinically anxious people in attention-training trials showed no measurable threat bias (Kruijt et al., 2019).

Interpretation bias: Currently anxious patients read ambiguous sentences as threatening more than controls and recovered patients did. The bias tracked the anxious state (Eysenck et al., 1991).

Rumination and Worry: Thinking That Keeps Distress Going

Response Styles Theory

Nolen-Hoeksema's response styles theory says how you respond to low mood affects how long it lasts. Rumination is a repetitive, passive focus on your symptoms and their causes and consequences. "Why am I so tired? What's wrong with me? I'll never get anything done." The alternative is distraction: taking action to turn attention away from symptoms.

Rumination prolongs depression because low mood colors thinking and blocks problem solving (Nolen-Hoeksema, 1991). Dysphoric people told to ruminate made more negative interpretations and solved interpersonal problems worse. Those told to distract did as well as nondysphoric people (Lyubomirsky & Nolen-Hoeksema, 1995).

The theory was first offered to explain why depression is more common in women, who ruminate more when sad. Later work found rumination predicts onset more consistently than duration and is also tied to anxiety, binge eating, binge drinking, and self-harm (Nolen-Hoeksema et al., 2008).

Worry as Cognitive Avoidance

Worry, the core feature of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), is mostly verbal thought, not mental images. It may serve as avoidance of emotional imagery and the body sensations that come with it (Borkovec & Inz, 1990). Speech-anxious people who worried before picturing a feared scene showed less heart rate response but reported more fear than people who thought neutral thoughts (Borkovec & Hu, 1990). Worry blunted emotional processing, which may keep the fear intact.

Worry is like reading the script so you never watch the scary scene. The script feels safer, but you never get used to the scene.

The common way to tell them apart: rumination dwells on the past (what went wrong and why), and worry runs ahead to feared future events. Both are repetitive negative thinking; they share a process but differ in content (Watkins et al., 2005; McCarrick et al., 2021).

Temperament: The Slow Dial Under Mood

Kagan's Behavioral Inhibition

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament marked by fear and restraint with unfamiliar people and situations. Kagan followed 2-year-olds who were extreme in restraint or spontaneity. By age 7, most restrained children were quiet and avoidant with unfamiliar people (Kagan et al., 1988).

BI is a major risk factor for social anxiety. Inhibited toddlers were more likely to have generalized social anxiety at 13, but not specific fears, separation anxiety, or performance anxiety (Schwartz et al., 1999). A meta-analysis found BI raised the odds of social anxiety disorder more than sevenfold (Clauss & Blackford, 2012). Thomas and Chess are covered in the temperament and personality lesson.

Gray's BIS and BAS

Gray's behavioral inhibition system (BIS) responds to novelty and signals of punishment or nonreward. It stops ongoing behavior and raises arousal and attention. Gray said BIS activity is anxiety (Gray, 1983). The behavioral activation system (BAS) is the reward side. On Carver and White's (1994) scales, high-BIS people got more nervous expecting punishment, and high-BAS people got happier expecting reward. Depressed adults report low BAS and high BIS (Kasch et al., 2002).

Trap alert: Kagan's behavioral inhibition is a child temperament. Gray's behavioral inhibition system is a motivational system everyone has.

Affectivity and the Tripartite Model

Negative affectivity (NA) is a stable trait. High-NA people feel discomfort across situations, even without obvious stress, and dwell on the negative side of themselves and the world (Watson & Clark, 1984). Positive affectivity (PA) is the tendency toward joy, enthusiasm, and alertness. PA and NA are largely independent dimensions, not two ends of one scale; the PANAS measures each (Watson et al., 1988).

The tripartite model explains why anxiety and depression overlap yet differ (Clark & Watson, 1991):

Picture two songs on the same bass line (high NA). Depression drops the melody (low PA). Anxiety cranks up the drums (hyperarousal).

Psychosocial Inputs: How the Social World Shapes Beliefs and Behavior

Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat is the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about your group. Black students took a hard verbal test. When it was framed as measuring ability, they scored below White students, with SAT scores controlled. When it was framed as not measuring ability, the gap disappeared (Steele & Aronson, 1995).

It's like a dancer who knows the judges expect a stumble. Carrying that pressure onto the floor is enough to throw off the step.

Caveat: meta-analyses find smaller effects and signs of publication bias (d = -0.22 for girls on math, science, and spatial tests; Flore & Wicherts, 2015), with negligible to small effects under real high-stakes conditions (Shewach et al., 2019).

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Pygmalion Effect

In a self-fulfilling prophecy, an expectation changes behavior in a way that makes the expectation come true. In Rosenthal and Jacobson's (1968) Pygmalion study, teachers were told some students would "bloom" that year. The students were picked at random, yet by year's end they showed larger IQ gains (Rubie-Davies & Hattie, 2024).

Caveat: later research shows classroom expectancy effects are real but usually small, may fade, and may be stronger for students from stigmatized groups. Teacher expectations often predict outcomes because they are accurate (Jussim & Harber, 2005).

Culture and Cognition: Holistic vs. Analytic Thinking

Nisbett and colleagues (2001) argued that culture shapes thinking style. Holistic thinking, more common in East Asian samples, attends to the whole field, explains events through context, and relies on dialectical reasoning. Analytic thinking, more common in Western samples, focuses on the object and its category and uses formal logic. Japanese participants recognized objects better in their original setting than a new one, while setting barely mattered for Americans (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001).

Scarcity and Mental Bandwidth

Mani and colleagues (2013) argued that poverty itself uses up mental capacity. Prompting thoughts about finances lowered cognitive scores in poorer but not wealthier participants. Farmers also scored worse before harvest, when money was tight, than after.

Caveat: a reanalysis treating income as continuous did not confirm the lab results (Wicherts & Scholten, 2013), and replications of 20 scarcity studies were mixed (O'Donnell et al., 2021).

Social Support as a Buffer

People with stronger social relationships had a 50% greater likelihood of survival across 148 studies (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). Cohen and Wills (1985) compared two models:

• Main (direct) effect: support helps whether or not you are stressed. Best supported when measuring integration in a large social network.
• Buffering: support protects people from the harm of stressful events. Best supported when measuring perceived availability of help that fits the stressor.

Both found support. Discrimination predicted distress among African American mothers in Detroit, but those with emotional support had less distress (Ajrouch et al., 2010). Buffering is like a helmet: little use on a quiet walk, a lot of use when you fall.

EPPP Traps and Common Misconceptions

Misconception 1: "The shock itself causes learned helplessness."

• Reality: In the triadic design, yoked dogs got shocks matched to the escape dogs'. Only the dogs without control gave up, so uncontrollability is the cause.

Misconception 2: "Locus of control and self-efficacy are the same."

• Reality: Locus of control is a general belief about who controls outcomes. Self-efficacy is task-specific confidence ("Can I do it?"), which also differs from outcome expectation ("Will it work?").

Misconception 3: "Affect and mood mean the same thing on a mental status exam."

• Reality: Mood is the sustained state the client reports. Affect is the shifting expression you observe.

Misconception 4: "Mood-congruent and mood-dependent memory are the same."

• Reality: Congruent means current mood matches the material's tone. Dependent means mood at recall matches mood at learning.

Misconception 5: "Negative affect separates anxiety from depression."

• Reality: High NA is shared. Low PA marks depression; hyperarousal marks anxiety.

Misconception 6: "Stereotype threat and Pygmalion effects are large and settled."

• Reality: Both are usually small, and the stereotype threat literature shows publication bias.

Memory Aids

• Helplessness timeline: "Dogs, Dimensions, Despair, Default" = 1967, 1978, 1989, 2016
• Helplessness deficits: the dog won't try (motivational), can't learn the new escape (cognitive), and is afraid (emotional)
• Reformulated attributions: Internal hits Identity (self-esteem), Stable hits Stretch of time, Global hits Ground covered
• Bandura's sources: "My Very Verbal Physique" = Mastery, Vicarious, Verbal persuasion, Physiological states. The first one is the strongest.
• Affect vs. mood: affect is weather you see; mood is climate they report
• Rumination vs. worry: rumination looks back; worry looks ahead
• Gray: BIS = Brakes; BAS = gas pedal toward reward
• Tripartite: NA is Not specific; low PA means Pleasure missing; hyperarousal means Heart racing

Key Takeaways

• Affect is the umbrella; emotion is intense and about something; mood is longer and milder; temperament is the early, biological foundation. Clinically, affect is observed and shifting; mood is reported and sustained.
• Beck: schemas → cognitive triad → biased processing. Ellis: beliefs, not events, drive emotional consequences.
• Helplessness line: uncontrollable shock in a yoked triadic design (1967) → internal, stable, global attributions (1978) → hopelessness depression (1989) → passivity is default, control is learned (2016). Three deficits: motivational, cognitive, emotional.
• Locus of control is general; self-efficacy is task-specific, differs from outcome expectation, and comes from mastery (strongest), vicarious experience, persuasion, and physiological states.
• State-dependent, mood-dependent, and mood-congruent memory differ in what must match.
• Mood as information: feelings feed judgments unless credited to an irrelevant cause. AIM: heuristic and substantive judgments absorb more mood.
• Anxiety biases attention and interpretation toward threat; depression shows more memory bias. Recent clinical dot-probe data are weaker.
• Rumination (past-focused) prolongs depression and helps explain the gender gap; worry (future-focused) is cognitive avoidance in GAD.
• Temperament: behavioral inhibition predicts social anxiety; high BIS ties to anxiety, low BAS to depression; tripartite model: shared NA, low PA, hyperarousal.
• Psychosocial inputs: know each classic finding, then its smaller modern effect size.

Now cover the tables and rebuild the helplessness timeline and the three memory terms. That is the testing effect at work.