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Instrument Development

Mood List

The Mood List was developed because – unlike the many questionnaires that exist for adults or adolescents in this respect - there was no available mood questionnaire for children. The Mood Questionnaire proved its usefulness in a number of studies. The questionnaire comprises 4 mood scales (3 negative: anger, sadness and fear; 1 positive: happiness), each consisting of 4 items. Thus, the total list consisted of 16 items, with 4 extra positive filler items. Children are asked, “How have you been feeling lately?” as an introduction to these 16 items. Children are asked to score each item on a Likert type scale (0 = never, 1 = sometimes, 2 = often). An example of an item is: “I never / sometimes / often feel angry”. The internal consistency for each mood-scale is good (Alpha > .70 for each scale). The questionnaire shows a strong convergent validity with related aspects, such as depression (CDI, Kovacs, 1992) and anxiety (SAS-K, Dekking, 1983) (Meerum Terwogt et al, 2003).

  • Validation of the original Mood List:

Rieffe C, Meerum Terwogt M, Bosch JD (2002). Emotie-identificatie en rapportage lichamelijke klachten bij kinderen. Kind en Adolescent, 23, 3, 154-169.

  • For validation of the Mood List in Farsi:

Rieffe, C., Oosterveld, P., Meerum Terwogt, M., Novin, S., Nasiri, H., & Latifian, M. (2010). Relationship between alexithymia, mood and internalizing symptoms in children and young adolescents: Evidence from an Iranian sample. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 425-430.

  • For validation of the Mood List in Spanish:

Rieffe, C., Villanueva, L., Adrián, J.E. & Górriz, A.B. (2009). Somatic complaints, mood states and emotional awareness in adolescents. Psicothema, 21, 459-464.

Górriz Plumed, A. B., Prado-Gascó, V., Villanueva, L., Ordoñez, Ana, González, R. (2013). The MOOD Questionnaire: Adaptation and validation of the Spanish version. Num. 2 (25). pp. 252-257.

  • For validation of the Mood List in Spanish in adult samples:

Górriz, A. B., Etchezahar, E., Pinilla-Rodríguez, D. E., Giménez-Espert, M. C., & Prado-Gascó, V. (2020). Cross-cultural validation of the Mood Questionnaire in three Spanish-speaking countries Argentina, Ecuador, and Spain, The Journal of Social Psychology. doi: 10.1080/00224545.2020.1791029.

Here you can download different versions of the Mood List:

The Dutch version:

The English version:

The Spanish version:

Syntax to compute the scales:

Please note that we currently do not have norm scores or cut-off scores for our questionnaires. Read Frequently Asked Questions for more details.