Mood is an element in the overall assessment process in almost every published recommendation on interviewing and is a routine part of both a psychiatric and a mental status examination. The most common way to assess mood is the clinical or assessment interview. If the construct is a mood, the pattern of change provides information about the improvement or lack of change in the emotional state. If the construct is a trait, temporal stability is expected. The temporal reliability of an instrument is particularly important when assessing mood, because the respondent’s score at different times is often important. All of the measures reviewed in this article have acceptable reliability and validity. Psychometric properties refer to the reliability, validity, internal structure, and correlations with external behavior of scores on the scale. In general, tests and scales that have ways to detect tendencies toward inaccurate or inconsistent responding are more valid than those without such means.įinally, psychologists evaluate the psychometric properties of tests and scales prior to using an instrument. However, if research has found that depressed respondents often answer, “False” to the item “I like to eat candy,” the item is not obviously related to depression (i.e., provides a subtle assessment of depression). A respondent motivated to fake a response could do so easily on such an item. For example, “I feel blue most of the time” is an obvious item when assessing depression. An obvious item is one where the content of the item is logically related to the mood being assessed. Some tests and scales include items that are both obvious and subtle to control for faking. Inaccurate or “faked” responses are more likely when an evaluation is conducted to decide about employment, child custody, or prison release, or to obviate or attenuate a court verdict. When assessing moods, psychologists consider whether the respondent is reporting honestly or is faking a response (i.e., exaggerating or underreporting his or her problems and emotional state). Others are referred to as narrow-band tests, signifying that they assess only a single specific mood.

Some of these instruments are referred to as broad-band instruments because they assess a variety of emotions. Some of these use a true/false format, others have a checklist format, and still others have a multiple-choice format, but the format is less important than the range of content included in the instrument. This entry reviews the instruments and scales most commonly used by psychologists to assess disturbances in mood. A systematic assessment evaluates all aspects of mood, whereas an unstructured assessment guided by clinical judgment can become sidetracked on a particular line of inquiry and fail to assess all aspects of the problem. Although there are psychologists who tend to rely on their own clinical judgments and avoid more formal assessments, a formal and organized assessment typically provides more accurate information than interviewing a patient in an unstructured manner. The most common methods of assessing mood are the clinical interview and the use of a self-report inventory, but some psychologists use projective tests to assess mood. A client’s mood permeates almost any aspect of psychological intervention, and hence a reliable assessment of mood is part of the psychologist’s armamentarium.

Define different types of moods