MOOD AS A REAL PHENOMENON: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ADJECTIVE ESTIMATION OF SUBJECTIVE STATE WITH SPECIFIC CORTICAL ACTIVITY

In the article the character of relationship between brain processes and subjective experience is considered. Based on the concept of consciousness as a emergent property of complex brain processes (Sperry, 1969), the authors postulate that mood, as a psychophysiological phenomenon, can be studied using laboratory methods. The experiment is an attempt to establish the relationship between reported mood, described by Thayer's Activation-Deactivation Adjective Check List - ADACL (Thayer 1989) and spectral power density of the brain waves in spontaneous EEG. The results show, that estimation of mood on the Energy-Sleep dimension is correlated negatively with alpha activity and the Tension-Placidity dimension is correlated negatively with theta band power. This may lead to conclusion, that specific variability of brain activation states is differentiated in verbal reports.