Thank you. As ever, I was delighted by the response to my Friday request to complete a short mood questionnaire, even though I’d explained that it wouldn’t actually give you any feedback at its conclusion. 310 people were kind enough to take part, which is over 10% of our readership – an impressive response rate. So, as I say, thank you hugely to everyone who helped out.

Now I know this probably won’t interest everyone, but I thought I’d give you some of the results in today’s post. Please feel free to skip them, and come back tomorrow if this kind of thing isn’t your scene. However there are some quite intriguing findings, which have already helped me as I continue to work towards finding a really versatile mood test.
Here we go then. First, the top line numbers for three overall themes – Anxiety, Anger, and Sadness.
The percentage figures are the proportion of respondents who fell into each of six “buckets”:
Angry
Very – 0.3%
Quite a bit – 7.0%
Moderately – 16.1%
A little – 30.8%
Very slightly – 41.1%
Not at all – 4.7%
Anxious
Very – 3.3%
Quite a bit – 10.0%
Moderately – 28.1%
A little – 38.5%
Very slightly – 18.4%
Not at all – 1.7%
Sad
Very – 7.0%
Quite a bit – 14.0%
Moderately – 19.1%
A little – 25.8%
Very slightly – 31.4%
Not at all – 2.7%
Of the three broad emotions, Anxiety and Sadness seemed the most top-loaded, while Anger was relatively less common (certainly in this sample).
Now we’ll get into a lot more detail. (Hopefully not TOO much, but as I said earlier, please feel free to skip the rest if numbers aren’t your thing.)
A few paragraphs down, you’ll find a table of sorts.
Its first column is a correlation coefficient, which is a way of understanding how closely the two items in the second column are related. In this table, a score of 1 would mean that the two terms are completely in sync – in other words, all 310 people who took part in the survey selected exactly the same answer for both of the two items. For example, everyone who said they were Moderately Sad would have needed to also say they were Moderately Downhearted.
Where a pair of terms are a combination of a negative and positive term, I’ve reversed the scoring. So to arrive at a coefficient of 1 (the maximum, remember) everyone, for example, who said they were Not at all Sad, would also have had to say they were Very Happy (an opposites kind of thing).
A correlation coefficient of 0 (zero) would mean that there was absolutely no relationship between the two items. You might get a result like that if you asked people to report on their eye colour alongside their weight. As far as I know, the two are entirely unrelated.
Looking at our results, then, we see that the strongest relationship of the 66 pairs was between Sad and Downhearted. Not too suprising, that, and it’s evidence that Downhearted pretty much means the same as Sad.
The weakest relationship? It was between Confident and Annoyed: there’s very little connection between NOT being Annoyed, and feeling Confident. Again, I’d suggest this isn’t too surprising.
So, what – if any – surprises WERE there? Well, after all the more obvious pairings, when you get about twenty items down, you start to see a few quite strong connections between unhappiness and anxiety. Certainly for Moodnudges readers, anxiety seems to contribute quite strongly to a lower overall mood.
0.77 Sad – Downhearted
0.73 Upbeat – Happy
0.70 Happy – Good-Tempered
0.69 Annoyed – Angry
0.68 Happy – Downhearted
0.68 Nervous – Anxious
0.65 Good-Tempered – Easygoing
0.65 Sad – Happy
0.62 Happy – Confident
0.62 Happy – Easygoing
0.62 Upbeat – Downhearted
0.62 Upbeat – Good-Tempered
0.61 Upbeat – Confident
0.60 Upbeat – Sad
0.59 Good-Tempered – Downhearted
0.59 Sad – Good-Tempered
0.57 Downhearted – Angry
0.54 Downhearted – Anxious
0.54 Good-Tempered – Angry
0.53 Downhearted – Confident
0.53 Sad – Anxious
0.53 Sad – Confident
0.51 Unworried – Happy
0.50 Good-Tempered – Annoyed
0.50 Good-Tempered – Confident
0.50 Nervous – Downhearted
0.50 Sad – Easygoing
0.49 Downhearted – Annoyed
0.49 Easygoing – Anxious
0.49 Easygoing – Confident
0.49 Easygoing – Downhearted
0.48 Confident – Anxious
0.48 Unworried – Anxious
0.48 Unworried – Good-Tempered
0.48 Upbeat – Easygoing
0.47 Sad – Nervous
0.47 Unworried – Easygoing
0.47 Upbeat – Unworried
0.46 Anxious – Angry
0.46 Good-Tempered – Anxious
0.46 Unworried – Downhearted
0.44 Happy – Anxious
0.44 Sad – Angry
0.44 Unworried – Nervous
0.44 Unworried – Sad
0.43 Unworried – Confident
0.42 Nervous – Confident
0.41 Happy – Angry
0.40 Anxious – Annoyed
0.40 Nervous – Easygoing
0.39 Easygoing – Angry
0.39 Nervous – Angry
0.39 Nervous – Happy
0.39 Upbeat – Anxious
0.38 Upbeat – Angry
0.37 Happy – Annoyed
0.37 Sad – Annoyed
0.36 Easygoing – Annoyed
0.36 Nervous – Annoyed
0.36 Nervous – Good-Tempered
0.35 Unworried – Annoyed
0.34 Unworried – Angry
0.33 Confident – Angry
0.33 Upbeat – Nervous
0.30 Upbeat – Annoyed
0.26 Confident – Annoyed
Perhaps you’ve spotted things of interest in here? If so, I’d welcome your thoughts. Please feel free to share them…