Biopsychology of Mood and Arousal

Robert E. Thayer, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. His training is in psychology of personality with specialties in biopsychology and psychophysiological approaches to mood, emotion, and personality. His research is widely cited in the scientific literature, and recently his work has received a great deal of attention in the popular literature in relation to the mood effects of walking, sugar snacking,and biological cycles.

• Introduction; Modern perspectives on mood; Arousal: A basic element of mood and behaviour; Daily rhythms of subjective energy and other biopsychological cycles; Determinants of energetic and tense arousal, including cognitive-mood interactions; The natural interaction of energetic and tense moods: A multidimensional arousal model; Issues relating to formal and informal research on mood; Toward an understanding of nonpathological mood states: Evidence, speculations, and applications; Appendices; References.

"This is a courageous and most welcome effort to establish the concept of mood as an important part of psychology. It reviews the literature exhaustively, and organizes it in terms of the writer's own long continued work in this area. He is not afraid to look at the biological as well as the introspective aspects of moods, and gives us an integrative model of moods and mood changes which will dominate research in the coming years." --H.J. Eysenck,University of London"Thayer brings together in his book all of the important perspectives on mood, as represented both in current research and in historically older concepts, such as arousal. In his review of the literature Thayer ranges wide, including--although the book is primarily about normal mood--references, to the mood/cognition experiments in abnormal psychology which themselves have done much to advance interest in the topic." --The Psychologist"Ideally, the publication of this book will not only alert more people to the existence of Thayer's intriguing theory, but it will also inspire both researchers who favor his model and those who oppose it to conduct more empirical work to support their ideas." --Contemporary Psychology"This is a courageous and most welcome effort to establish the concept of mood as an important part of psychology. It reviews the literature exhaustively, and organizes it in terms of the writer's own long continued work in this area. He is not afraid to look at the biological as well as the introspective aspects of moods, and gives us an integrative model of moods and mood changes which will dominate research in the coming years." --H.J. Eysenck,University of London"Thayer brings together in his book all of the important perspectives on mood, as represented both in current research and in historically older concepts, such as arousal. In his review of the literature Thayer ranges wide, including--although the book is primarily about normal mood--references, to the mood/cognition experiments in abnormal psychology which themselves have done much to advance interest in the topic." --The Psychologist"Ideally, the publication of this book will not only alert more people to the existence of Thayer's intriguing theory, but it will also inspire both researchers who favor his model and those who oppose it to conduct more empirical work to support their ideas." --Contemporary Psychology