Question

Passage:

Every conscious mental state carries a quality we call mood. We are always in some mood, pleasant or unpleasant to some degree. Bad moods may come from too little positive reinforcement in a person's life, along with too many punishments. Moods differ from emotions in one clear way: emotions are tied to a specific object, while moods are not. This split is not perfect, since emotions can also be aimed at something broad (a person can be angry at people in general), while a mood still carries a general sense about the state of the world at large. Moods show up as positive or negative feelings linked to health, personality, or how good a person feels life is. Moods can also grow out of an emotion, such as the mood that follows a specific event like failing to secure a loan. In that sense, a mood is the mind's judgment on the recent past. Goldie notes that an emotion can rise and fall inside a mood, while an emotion can still carry traits that are not object specific.

Moods matter to marketing because they color outlook and bias judgment. This is why consumer confidence surveys matter, since consumer confidence reflects the national mood. There is mood congruence when a person's thoughts and actions fall in line with their mood. Goleman describes this as a constant stream of feeling that runs in perfect harmony with a person's stream of thought. Mood congruence happens because a positive mood brings pleasant associations that soften later thoughts and actions, while a negative mood brings pessimistic associations that shape later judgment and behavior. A consumer in a good mood is more optimistic and confident about buying, and more willing to put up with things like waiting in a queue. Businesses try to put customers in the right mood using music and friendly staff, or place bakeries inside malls so the smell of fresh bread pulls shoppers in.

Thayer treats mood as a mix of biological and psychological influences, a kind of clinical thermometer that reflects everything going on inside and outside a person. For Thayer, the two building blocks of mood are energy and tension, combined in different amounts. A specific mixture of energy and tension, together with the thoughts they influence, produces moods. He describes four mood states:
- Calm-energy: the optimal mood for feeling good.
- Calm-tiredness: mild tiredness without stress, which can still feel pleasant.
- Tense-energy: a low level of anxiety suited to a fight-or-flight response.
- Tense-tiredness: a mix of fatigue and anxiety behind the unpleasant feeling of depression.

People generally feel down or feel good because of events happening around them, and this adds up to the national mood. People feel elated when their national soccer team wins an international match, and low when the team loses. An elated mood of calm-energy is an optimistic mood, which is good for business. Consumers, as socially involved individuals, are shaped by the prevailing social climate, and marketers talk about the national mood running for or against conspicuous consumption. Moods do change. Writing early in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville describes an American elite embarrassed by showy material display; sixty years later, in the Gilded Age, many people were eager to embrace a showy, materialistic style instead. The hard part is predicting a shift in national mood, since a change in mood affects everything from buying stocks to buying houses and washing machines. Thayer would argue that we should watch for national events likely to push people toward a tense-tiredness state or a calm-energy state, since these two extremes are more likely to shape behavior. Artists sensitive to national moods capture these long-term shifts. One example is the emotional distance between Charles Dickens's sentimental account of the death of Little Nell and Oscar Wilde's cruel joke about it (that one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell), a shift from high Victorian sentiment to the sharper cynicism found later in writers like Thomas Hardy and artists like Aubrey Beardsley.

Whenever the mind is not fully absorbed, consciousness is no longer focused and ordered, and under such conditions the mind drifts toward unpleasant thoughts, building a negative mood. Csikszentmihalyi argues that the human need to keep consciousness fully active drives a good deal of consumer behavior. Sometimes it does not matter what a person is shopping for; the act of shopping itself is one way to fill the void in consciousness when there is nothing else to do.

Question: The statement "moods provide energy for human actions" is ________, based on the passage.

• A. Always right.
• B. Always wrong.
• C. Sometimes right.
• D. Not derived from the passage.

Hint:

Check the energy claim against all four of Thayer's mood states, not just calm-energy.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

This question checks the claim moods provide energy for human actions against Thayer's four mood states rather than against the passage as a single block, since energy is only one of the two ingredients, energy and tension, Thayer uses to build mood.

1. Always right: fails, because Thayer's tense-tiredness state is described as a mixture of fatigue and anxiety, which reads as low energy, not energy, so not every mood supplies energy.
2. Always wrong: fails, because the passage directly ties calm-energy, one of Thayer's four states, to an optimistic mood that is good for business, which is a clear case of mood supplying energy.
3. Sometimes right: fits, since some states (calm-energy) support the claim and others (tense-tiredness) do not, which is exactly what sometimes means.
4. Not derived from the passage: fails, since the passage explicitly discusses energy as one of the two building blocks of mood and even names a state built around it.

A fifth choice, contradictory, also fails, since nothing in the passage's account of energy and mood conflicts with itself; it is simply a claim that holds for some states and not others.

Let's summarize:

• When a passage names several sub-types of something, here four mood states, test broad claims against each sub-type before picking always or never.
• Sometimes right is often correct when a claim holds for some named cases and fails for others, rather than none or all.

The correct option is (CC), sometimes right.