Affect is how you look to me.

Affect involves me (an outsider) judging your internal emotional state (as it looks from the outside). Whew.

Mood is how you feel to you.

Mood is inherently subjective and limited by your vocabulary, previous experiences, and inclination or disinclination toward feeling your feelings.

Independently, neither affect nor mood makes for a perfect assessment. But let’s be honest, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and there’s no such thing as a perfect assessment. Even in elegant combination, affect and mood only provide us with limited information about a client’s emotional life.

Our information is limited and always falls short of truth because, not only is there always that pesky standard error of measurement, also, emotion is, by definition, phenomenologically subjective and elusive. Emotion, especially in the form of affect or mood, is a particularly fragile and quirky entrepreneur of physiology and cascading neurochemical caveats. Nothing and everything is or isn’t as it seems.

As an interviewer, even a simple emotional observation may be perceived as critical or inaccurate or offensive in ways we can only imagine. Saying, “You seem angry” might be experienced as critical or inaccurate and inspire the affect you’re watching and the mood your client is experiencing to hide, like Jonah, inside the belly of a whale.

Oddly, on another day with the same client, your emotional reflection—whether accurate or inaccurate—might facilitate emotional clarity; affect and mood may re-unite, and your client will experience insight and deepening emotional awareness.

As a clinician, despite your efforts to be a detached, objective observer, you might experience a parallel emotional process. Not only could your understanding of your client deepen, but ironically, because emotional lives resist isolation, you might experience your own emotional epiphany.

Rest assured, as with all emotional epiphanies—including our constitutionally guaranteed inevitable and unenviable pursuit of happiness—you’ll soon find yourself staring at your emotional epiphany through your rear view mirror.

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Just for fun, below I’ve included a link to a brief clip of me doing a mental status examination with a young man named Carl. A longer version of my interview with Carl is available with the 6^th edition of Clinical Interviewing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lu50uciF5Y