“Varieties of Mood Experience” by Tatyana “Tanya” Kostochka

“Varieties of Mood Experience” by Tatyana “Tanya” Kostochka

“Research in psychology suggests that moods vary across cultures in several different ways. This means that any adequate theory of moods has to explain how this is possible. Moreover, the theory has to predict the right amount and the right kind of variation. The purpose of this talk is to put forward a new account of moods—the patterns of attention view, according to which a mood is nothing over and above a pattern of attention. I argue that the incredible flexibility of the view can provide an elegant explanation of the ways that moods have been proposed to vary across cultures. Between feelings theories which give us too little cultural variation and cognitive theories that give us too much, the patterns of attention theory gets it just right.”—Tatyana Kostochka.

Tatyana “Tanya” Kostochka is a PhD student at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation focuses on moods—what they are, how they relate to the rest of our psychology, how they relate to moods in art, and so on. She also works on ethics in medieval Japanese Buddhist philosophy. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Ryukoku University Research Center for Buddhist Cultures in Asia.