Emotion, Mood, and Personality: A Dynamic Systems Synthesis

Marc Lewis’ dynamic systems model of emotional self-organization provides a way of viewing emotion, mood, and personality as different aspects or levels of continuous processes rather than as discrete characteristics of the mind or person as conceptualized in traditional psychology. As Evan Thompson puts it, Lewis’ model includes these three time-scales of the microdevelopment of emotion at the scale of seconds or minutes, the mesodevelopment of mood at the scale of hours or days, and the macrodevelopment of personality.

Emotional processes are rapid emotional interpretations, which include a large cognitive component. Indeed, there is a large overlap between emotional and cognitive systems anatomically in the brain and phenomenologically in experience. What we call emotion is typically this emotional interpretation that includes both a raw affect and a cognitive appraisal of that affect. This emotional interpretation with its component parts in turn engages preparedness for action on the environment, creating a feedback loop.

These short time-scale emotional interpretations, which we all experience constantly throughout our conscious engagement with the world, can be seen as points in a state-space, the large-scale properties of which at any given time can be termed mood. Mood is this lasting effect of the accumulation of micro-emotional experiences.

At an even larger scale, personality can be viewed as the global properties of this state-space over large periods of time due to repeated emotional experiences and the subsequent moods that are enactivated because of these micro-experiences. Indeed, the moods further bias the mind-brain systems for further emotional and cognitive experiences of the same kind, again creating a feedback loop at this micro-meso level. Think of how negative emotional experiences can create a lasting mood that tends to keep one stuck in negative feelings and thoughts. Personality then is the macro-level properties and processes of these state-space patterns over an individual’s lifetime.

Again, feedback loops exist at each, and between each, level of this micro-meso-macro dynamic system. Each person will have a different profile and hence different characteristics of traits, biases, and tendencies that make them unique. Because of the continuity between these levels, potential interventions for change can work by manipulating aspects of the continuous flow of emotional interpretations in a bottom-up approach to personal transformation.