How RIZOM Thinks About Mood
- RIZOM
- 3d
- 3 min read
Updated: 14h
Beyond Affect, Emotions, and Feelings
In everyday language, words like mood, emotion, feeling, and affect are often used interchangeably.
In the RIZOM framework, these distinctions matter because they determine how one can model, map, and ultimately support human experience in both therapeutic and non-therapeutic contexts.
Most technologies today treat emotions as fixed categories (happy, sad, angry, afraid), sometimes expanded with tools like the Geneva Emotion Wheel (GEW), which allow to choose intensities for a single emotion or a blend of several emotions out of 20 distinct emotion families.
While this is useful for surface recognition, labels flatten the deeper dynamics of how we live, share, and transform experience. RIZOM takes a different approach: it models mood as a recursive symbolic field.
The Four Layers of Experience
1. Affect — Pre-symbolic intensity
The raw, bodily charge before we even have words for it.
A racing heartbeat, tension in the chest, warmth rising.
In RIZOM, affect is the spark that begins a cycle.
2. Feeling — Conscious registration
The moment that intensity becomes available to awareness.
“This feels heavy,” “this feels light.”
Here metaphors and images start to emerge.
3. Emotion — Nameable configuration
Feelings shaped into culturally recognisable categories.
Joy, anger, grief, surprise.
This is where the Geneva Emotion Wheel has its place. In RIZOM, it is only one layer in a larger recursive loop.
4. Mood — Field-level attunement
More than a single emotion: the atmosphere that shapes what can be felt, noticed, or named.
A sad mood colours many experiences; a playful mood opens new possibilities.
For RIZOM, mood is the prior field, i.e. the recursive horizon that conditions affect, feeling, and emotion.
In this portrait, Armand Voyeux revisits the flood of images from his Iranian childhood: heroic depictions of ordinary citizens who became war icons during the Iran-Iraq conflict.
This portrait carries us through the four layers of experience.
Affect: the raw jolt of the poppy’s red against yellow, a charge before words. One knows it is about death.
Feeling: the heaviness of the face, its muted tones surfacing into awareness.
Emotion: grief, sacrifice, endurance, shaped by cultural memory of war.
Mood: an atmosphere of detachment and persistence, where history still colours the present.
Why Mood Matters
By distinguishing these layers, RIZOM can do what other systems can’t:
Track the recursive dynamics of experience, to say how raw intensity becomes symbolic, and how symbolic forms reshape experience in turn.
Use advanced mathematical models to map how local expressions (a word, a gesture, a metaphor) glue together - or resist coherence - into a global mood field.
Go beyond recognition to modulation and meaning-making: mood once logged, is unfolded, reflected, and transformed.
From Therapy to Everyday Life
RIZOM is not a therapeutic tool. It does not diagnose, heal, or replace professional care. Instead, it builds on insights that emerged in therapeutic contexts - for example, how music therapy can use shared aesthetic experience to reshape mood - and carries them into wider fields of life. Think of the difference between music therapy in a clinic and music medicine through self-directed listening: the former is treatment, the latter is everyday support.
In the same way, RIZOM offers mood recursion as a resource for daily life, for creative practices, and for organisational design. It is about attunement and imagination rather than therapy, opening spaces where symbolic resonance can circulate outside the clinic or the therapist salon.
The RIZOM Difference
Where affective computing focuses on recognising surface emotions, RIZOM is designed for engaging the recursive field of mood. This means:
Respecting affect as raw intensity.
Honouring feelings as the first articulation.
Recognising emotions as symbolic tokens.
And most importantly, working with mood as the recursive field that holds it all together.
By doing so, RIZOM builds an architecture where technology can become a participant in emotional unfolding, far beyond the limitations of a classifier of feelings.
👉 This is why in the RIZOM framework, mood is not an afterthought: it is the foundation.
👉 If you want to explore how RIZOM can help leaders and organisations restore presence and coherence in an age of saturation, let’s open the conversation.
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