Happiness, sadness, compassion, resentment, despair: just some of the feelings and moods that characterize the lives of each one of us. They are part and parcel of our everyday lives and they affect everything we do, like a kind of mental climate that surrounds and permeates our activities and thoughts. But what exactly are these ever-present feelings and moods?

Here the leading psychiatrist Christophe Andre analyses feelings and moods as the contents of consciousness that mix together emotions and thoughts, the background sensations and impressions that are less intense than...