title: Mood and affect: a semantic confusion.
abstract: Although semantic clarity is a cornerstone of scientific psychiatry, psychiatrists often use technical words with the false assumption that their meanings are clear. The common use of the terms "mood" and "affect" illustrates this point. The authors attempt to show how unclear definitions of these words have led to confusion and how they could be more clearly understood by careful semantic and phenomenologic analysis.
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D011570:Psychiatry; D012660:Semantics; D009626:Terminology as Topic