Frequently Asked Questions

Moodset is a mood tracking app designed to help you improve your well-being by understanding your emotions and what influences them. It works by combining two sources of mood data: manual mood entries (where you record how you feel) and automatically tracked moods based on the music you listen to. By capturing both types of input, Moodset helps you identify emotional patterns, spot triggers, and better understand your mental health over time.

Moodset is designed for anyone who wants to better understand and improve their emotional well-being. It's especially helpful for people who experience mood swings, want to track their mental health, or are exploring the emotional impact of music. Whether you're on a personal growth journey, working with a therapist, or simply curious about your patterns, Moodset provides clarity through data. It's also a powerful tool for those involved in music therapy, offering a way to connect musical listening habits with emotional states.

Moodset helps you feel better by giving you a clearer picture of your emotional patterns and what influences them. By tracking your moods alongside the music you listen to and your own mood notes, it reveals connections you might not notice on your own. You can identify what lifts you up or brings you down, understand how you tend to feel over time, and use that insight to make more supportive choices. Moodset also offers mood-based playlists to help you process or shift your emotional state through music—so it's not just about tracking how you feel, but also supporting how you want to feel.

Moodset stands out by going beyond the one-dimensional mood scales used in most tracking apps — those that ask you to rate your mood from "bad" to "good" or on a 1–5 scale. Instead, it uses the scientifically backed valence-arousal model to map your mood on a two-dimensional plane. This allows for a much more accurate and detailed picture of your emotional state. Another unique feature is how Moodset integrates music. It automatically tracks the emotional tone of the music you listen to, offering an additional, passive layer of insight that reflects your mood without requiring extra effort. Your playlists become part of your emotional story. Finally, Moodset doesn't just help you understand your emotions — it helps you regulate them. You can explore mood-based playlists designed to deepen what you're feeling or gently shift your state of mind. This blend of emotional awareness and musical guidance sets Moodset apart from most other mood trackers.

Valence and arousal are two dimensions commonly used in psychology to describe emotions more precisely.

• Valence measures how pleasant or unpleasant an emotion feels. High valence means a positive feeling (like contentment or happiness), while low valence indicates a negative feeling (like sadness or anger).


• Arousal reflects the level of energy in the emotion. High arousal means the emotion is intense or activating (like excitement or anxiety), while low arousal describes calmer states (like relaxation or boredom).

Together, valence and arousal give a more nuanced view of your mood than traditional one-dimensional scales like "bad" to "good". They help map emotions more accurately — for example, both sadness and anger are negative emotions, but one is low-arousal and the other is high-arousal.

The Mood Map in Moodset is a visual tool that helps you track your emotional state using the valence-arousal model. It builds on the psychological framework known as the circumplex model of affect, giving you a clear, structured way to observe and reflect on your feelings.

The map is divided into four main quadrants:

• Negative valence & low arousal


• Negative valence & high arousal


• Positive valence & high arousal


• Positive valence & high arousal


• Positive valence & low arousal

Each quadrant is split into four mood zones, creating a total of 16 unique emotional zones. These zones are labeled with representative moods—such as "tense", "relaxed", or "happy"—to help you quickly grasp your general emotional state. However, the precise mood is defined by two numerical values:

• Valence ranges from 0 to 49 for negative emotions and 51 to 100 for positive emotions.


• Arousal ranges from 0 to 100, indicating the level of emotional activation from low to high.

A perfectly neutral mood is plotted at 50 valence and 50 arousal.

Moodset encourages you to focus on these specific values, as they offer a more accurate and personalized reflection of your emotional experience than broad labels. Over time, this allows you to see patterns in how you feel, connect them with triggers or habits, and make informed decisions to improve your emotional well-being.

The mood timeline on the chart provides a visual representation of your mood journey over time, showing both valence and arousal levels. The lines connecting the points on the chart are designed to give you a sense of how your mood changes. The lines vary in style (solid, dashed, or absent) based on the time intervals between your mood entries, giving you a quick understanding of the rhythm of your mood fluctuations. A solid line indicates closely spaced mood entries, suggesting a more continuous mood transition. A dashed line indicates a moderate gap between entries, allowing you to perceive mood shifts over slightly longer periods. An absent line signifies a significant time gap between entries, indicating the absence of data during that period. This visualization is tailored to make it easier for you to interpret your mood patterns and changes over the selected time period, helping you gain insights into how your emotions fluctuate and how different aspects of your life may influence your mood.

Moodset automatically tracks your mood by analyzing the emotional tone of the music you listen to. Each song carries emotional characteristics — like how happy, calm, intense, or melancholic it feels. Moodset uses these emotional signals, based on the valence-arousal model, to estimate how the music reflects your current mood. Because we often choose music that matches how we feel, your listening habits can reveal emotional patterns you might not even be aware of. This passive tracking works in the background and complements your manual mood entries, giving you a fuller and more nuanced picture of your emotional life.