29.4.4: Interpreting Mood

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Amanda Taintor

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Observing Emotions

It can take a lot of practice to "un-train" ourselves from recording the mood we interpret versus the actual behavior we see. A great way to start is to think about a list of emotions you might try to use in your documentation. Examples most typically used are: Happy, Sad, Angry, Mad. When we use the words happy, sad, and angry in our documentation, we interpret the mood from observed behaviors. Let's take a look at the mood happy. If a caregiver documents the child is "happy," they observe a specific behavior that makes them make the statement. The child might be smiling, laughing, giggling, or jumping excitedly. When we only document the word "happy," we don't know the demonstrated behavior. How about sad? If I document "the child was sad." Does another person reading my documentation know exactly what behavior the child is exhibiting? No, they wouldn't. You could guess, but you can't say if you were right, and a guess then violates another critical consideration of observation: Accuracy. If we describe the mood of sad, we might document it as, "the child began to softly cry into their hands, turning the face away from their peers." Does that description allow you to picture what is going on much more accurately?