Interpreting mood scores: Clinical implications of individual differences in mood variability

Abstract

Mood variability is shown to be a stable characteristic of individuals, such individual differences accounting for some 25 per cent of the total variability of mood scores over time. This large effect is shown to have three major consequences: it is impossible to use tables of norms to assess the severity of a given mood for an individual; the whole logic of using norms for the interpretation of moods is flawed; and correlations between moods and traits have been underestimated in the literature. Various techniques are discussed for minimizing the effects of bias caused by individual differences in mood variability.

Normative values for the profile of mood states for use with athletic samples

“…Reddon, Marceau, and Holden (1985) emphasized the importance of using norms of direct relevance to the population of interest after identifying significant differences between their sample of 361 college students and the norms proposed to represent such a population (McNair et al, 1971). Cooper and McConville (1990) went further in suggesting that individuals differed sufficiently in their mood variability to render as flawed the whole logic of using norms for the POMS (see also Penner, Shiffman, Paty, & Fritzsche, 1994). Whilst the superiority of using an individualized database of previous profiles to interpret the present mood of a particular athlete is not disputed, the benefit of a pool of normative scores which is as relevant as possible to the participants of interest is proposed.…”

Rigorous idiography: Exploring subjective and idiographic data with rigorous methods—The method of derangements

“…Quantitative exploration of the limits of psychometric generalisability are themselves fairly limited despite a long history. Work has shown clearly that individuals differ in temporal stability on many variables ( Epstein, 1979 , 1983 ; Cooper and McConville, 1990 ; McConville and Cooper, 1997 ). How measures are presented affects responding ( Braho and Bodinaku, 2015 ) and it is known that there is typically a mean shift in scores when mental health or well-being measures are completed twice by non-help-seeking samples ( Durham et al, 2002 ).…”