I Know Nothing, Lady Bracknell

Decided to do a quick lookup of what exactly is "affect". They use the term frequently on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, usually when appraising a suspect's guilt. "He has very low affect." What I found on affect and mood was very enlightening. I feel smarter already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)

Affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion.[1] Affect is a key part of the process of an organism's interaction with stimuli. The word also refers sometimes to affect display, which is "a facial, vocal, or gestural behavior that serves as an indicator of affect" (APA 2006). The affective domain represents one of the three divisions described in modern psychology: the cognitive, the conative, and the affective. Classically, these divisions have also been referred to as the "ABC of psychology", in that case using the terms "affect", "behavior", and "cognition". In certain views, the conative may be considered as a part of the affective,[2] or the affective as a part of the cognitive.[3]

Mood, like emotion, is an affective state. However, an emotion tends to have a clear focus (i.e., a self-evident cause), while mood tends to be more unfocused and diffused. Mood, according to Batson, Shaw, and Oleson (1992), involves tone and intensity and a structured set of beliefs about general expectations of a future experience of pleasure or pain, or of positive or negative affect in the future. Unlike instant reactions that produce affect or emotion, and that change with expectations of future pleasure or pain, moods, being diffused and unfocused, and thus harder to cope with, can last for days, weeks, months, or even years (Schucman, 1975). Moods are hypothetical constructs depicting an individual's emotional state. Researchers typically infer the existence of moods from a variety of behavioral referents (Blechman, 1990).

Hmmm. If a mood is a hypothetical construct, like reality is a social construct, then are moods even real? I went to look at views on this and found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

Social constructionism proposes that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention.

The smartness I gained, I think I just lost. I may even have gotten dumber. Flowers for Algernon.