Mood repair
Also known as: Affect repair
Actively doing things to lift yourself out of a bad mood.
What it means
Mood repair refers to the regulatory strategies people use to relieve or reverse a negative mood and restore a more positive state, such as seeking pleasant distractions, exercising, socializing, or recalling happy memories. It is one of the three appraisal dimensions in Salovey and Mayer's meta-mood model, alongside attention to and clarity about one's feelings, and stronger mood-repair beliefs predict better adjustment. Effective repair is adaptive, but some attempts backfire, as when people 'repair' with rumination, substance use, or comfort eating that worsen mood over time. Mood-repair tendencies interact with mood-maintenance motives: sad people are motivated to repair, whereas happy people are motivated to preserve. It is a practical hinge between everyday emotion regulation and well-being.
Examples
Feeling low after a rejection, you deliberately call a funny friend and go for a run to pull yourself back up.
After a bruising review, you spend the evening on takeaway and shopping apps. The lift lasts until the card statement arrives and drops the mood lower than it started.
Stuck in traffic after a row, a driver switches off the news and puts on an old favourite album, deliberately choosing what will shift the mood before she gets home.
First described in Salovey, Mayer, Goldman, Turvey & Palfai (1995); meta-mood model.