Podstawowe problemy w badaniach nad wpływem nastroju na funkcjonowanie człowieka

The purpose of the article is to present the main problems connected with the research into mood influence on different areas of human functioning. The author enumerates five basic problems which are: (1) the ambiguous use of the terms which refer to the affective processes, (2) the lack of mood induction procedure and the mood estimation measures which would prevent the subjects from guessing the aim of the study, (3) in the case of research into relatively permanent mood, the inconsistency which makes it impossible to clearly distinguish the individuals in a depressive mood from those who have been clinically diagnosed as suffering from depression, (4) the lack of research done on the subjects who are constantly in a positive mood, (5) the relatively small amount of research dealing with mood influence on specific aspects of human functioning as well as with meditative mechanisms. According to the author, finding the solution to the observed problems would make it possible to explain a lot of discrepancies in the results of already-conducted research.