Changeability of mood

Time sampling of emotional experience, several times a day over a period of several weeks (Brandstätter. 1977; Csikszentmihalyi, Larsen & Prescott, 1977; Diener, 1984), provides data which can be analyzed from many different perspectives. This paper focusses on the changeability of mood as a personality characteristic. Everybody would agree that mood changes all the time and that people differ in the frequency of mood changes. This intuitive idea was supported by a number of studies (for example Larsen, 1987; Penner, Shiffman, Paty and Fitzsche, 1994). But how these individual differences in variability of mood relate to basic personality dimensions like those of Cattell's 16PF second order factors (Schneewind, Schroder & Cattell, 1986) is an open question, on which the present paper will focus. unknown unknown