CarderPlanet
Professional
- Messages
- 2,552
- Reaction score
- 710
- Points
- 83
Sadness is another of the seven universal emotions that people around the world experience as a result of the loss of someone or something important.
In fact, feelings of sadness are a wide range of emotional states that we can experience, from mild disappointment to extreme despair and grief. Sadness can also be felt along with other emotions, including:
A universal trigger for sadness is the loss of a valuable person or object, although this can vary greatly depending on personal definitions of value and loss. Common triggers for sadness include:
Sad mood
The key difference between mood and emotion lies in duration. Sadness is one of the longest-lasting emotions that often goes through periods of protest, resignation, and helplessness, and can last for days. Importantly, it differs from depression, which is a common but serious psychological disorder: it is characterized by repetitive, persistent and intense feelings of sadness and hopelessness that interfere with daily life and can be debilitating.
Mimically, one of the strongest and most obvious signs of sadness is a slight drooping of the upper eyelids. The fact is that few people are able to manipulate these muscles voluntarily, and this makes it especially difficult to fake sadness.
Depending on the type and intensity of sadness, a person's voice can either become quieter and quieter, or, conversely, shift to higher tones or transform into crying. Physical feelings of sadness include tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, sore throat, and watery eyes. Loss of muscle tone, lowered or hunched back, sideways and / or downward gaze are also common.
What's going on in my head
One study suggests that feelings of sadness may be associated with increased "contact" between two areas of the brain. A group of researchers listened to the electrical signals that brain regions send to each other and found that when a person feels depressed, communication between brain cells in two specific areas involved in memory and emotion - the amygdala and the hippocampus - is enhanced.
It is not yet clear if this increased brain communication is a cause or a consequence of being in a bad mood, and it is unclear exactly how emotions and memories are intertwined. Do negative emotions evoke sad memories, or vice versa? However, based on experimentation and the effects of sadness in the brain, scientists believe that it can provide us with important benefits.
In modern culture, sadness is generally not appreciated - self-help books promote the benefits of positive thinking, attitudes and behavior, calling sadness a “problematic emotion” that needs to be contained or addressed. However, evolution has added this emotion to our arsenal, which means that at times, sadness serves some kind of lofty purpose in helping our species survive. Although, of course, the evolutionary benefits of sadness are more difficult to understand than the benefits of other "negative emotions" like adaptive fear, anger, or disgust, which stimulate us to flee, fight, or avoid. And yet they are!
Sadness can improve memory
It is known that on rainy, unpleasant days that cause a bad mood, people are much better at remembering the details of items seen in the store. Conversely, on clear, sunny days, when people are happy, their memory in a similar situation is much less accurate. It seems that a positive mood worsens, and a negative one improves attention and memory for random details in our environment. Given the increased focus, negative mood makes it less likely that false information will subsequently distort the original memory.
Sadness can improve judgment
Sadness can increase the accuracy of judgment when forming impressions, contributing to more detailed and attentive thinking styles. For example, it is known to reduce common subjective biases such as the fundamental attribution error, where people attribute deliberate behavior to the behavior of others, ignoring situational factors, and the halo effect, where certain positive traits, such as a beautiful face, make us assume that there are not necessarily other positive ones. qualities like kindness and intelligence. Negative mood can also reduce another subjective bias, the primacy effect, where people pay too much attention to early information and ignore later details.
Sadness can boost motivation
When we feel happy, we strive to maintain a feeling of happiness - it signals that we are in a safe familiar situation and that there is no need to make an effort to change something, everything is fine. On the other hand, sadness acts as a mild alarm, increasing motivation and encouraging us to put in more effort to deal with the problem in our environment. A sad mood can increase persistence as people see great potential benefits from their actions.
In some cases, sadness can improve interactions
Overall, happiness increases positive interactions between people. Happy people are more level-headed, assertive, and skillful communicators, they smile more, and are generally considered prettier. However, sadness can help in situations where a more cautious, less assertive, and more considerate communication style is required. Sad people focus more on external cues and will not rely solely on first impressions, which happy people are more likely to trust.
So, sad people are less prone to errors of judgment, more resistant to distortion, sometimes more motivated and more sensitive to social norms. But, of course, sadness has its limits, and this does not mean at all that you need to specifically try to become sad in order to strengthen your memory.
However, mild, temporary states of sadness can be beneficial in various aspects of life. Evolutionary theory suggests that we must accept all of our emotions, as each of them plays an important role in certain circumstances. So as you continue to look for ways to be happier, don't put sadness aside. It's not just that many of the greatest achievements of Western art, music and literature explore the landscape of sadness, but in everyday life, people look for ways to experience this feeling by listening to sad songs, watching sad films and reading sad books.
In fact, feelings of sadness are a wide range of emotional states that we can experience, from mild disappointment to extreme despair and grief. Sadness can also be felt along with other emotions, including:
- anger (for example, when a loved one dumped you);
- fear (for example, when you feel like you can't handle it and don't know how to get on with it);
- joy (for example, when you recall the time spent with a person who no longer exists).
A universal trigger for sadness is the loss of a valuable person or object, although this can vary greatly depending on personal definitions of value and loss. Common triggers for sadness include:
- rejection by a friend or lover;
- completing something important or saying goodbye;
- illness or death of a loved one;
- loss of some aspects of identity (for example, during the transition period at home, at work, in life stages);
- disappointment with an unexpected outcome (such as being denied a promotion when you expected it).
Sad mood
The key difference between mood and emotion lies in duration. Sadness is one of the longest-lasting emotions that often goes through periods of protest, resignation, and helplessness, and can last for days. Importantly, it differs from depression, which is a common but serious psychological disorder: it is characterized by repetitive, persistent and intense feelings of sadness and hopelessness that interfere with daily life and can be debilitating.
Mimically, one of the strongest and most obvious signs of sadness is a slight drooping of the upper eyelids. The fact is that few people are able to manipulate these muscles voluntarily, and this makes it especially difficult to fake sadness.
Depending on the type and intensity of sadness, a person's voice can either become quieter and quieter, or, conversely, shift to higher tones or transform into crying. Physical feelings of sadness include tightness in the chest, heaviness in the limbs, sore throat, and watery eyes. Loss of muscle tone, lowered or hunched back, sideways and / or downward gaze are also common.
What's going on in my head
One study suggests that feelings of sadness may be associated with increased "contact" between two areas of the brain. A group of researchers listened to the electrical signals that brain regions send to each other and found that when a person feels depressed, communication between brain cells in two specific areas involved in memory and emotion - the amygdala and the hippocampus - is enhanced.
It is not yet clear if this increased brain communication is a cause or a consequence of being in a bad mood, and it is unclear exactly how emotions and memories are intertwined. Do negative emotions evoke sad memories, or vice versa? However, based on experimentation and the effects of sadness in the brain, scientists believe that it can provide us with important benefits.
In modern culture, sadness is generally not appreciated - self-help books promote the benefits of positive thinking, attitudes and behavior, calling sadness a “problematic emotion” that needs to be contained or addressed. However, evolution has added this emotion to our arsenal, which means that at times, sadness serves some kind of lofty purpose in helping our species survive. Although, of course, the evolutionary benefits of sadness are more difficult to understand than the benefits of other "negative emotions" like adaptive fear, anger, or disgust, which stimulate us to flee, fight, or avoid. And yet they are!
Sadness can improve memory
It is known that on rainy, unpleasant days that cause a bad mood, people are much better at remembering the details of items seen in the store. Conversely, on clear, sunny days, when people are happy, their memory in a similar situation is much less accurate. It seems that a positive mood worsens, and a negative one improves attention and memory for random details in our environment. Given the increased focus, negative mood makes it less likely that false information will subsequently distort the original memory.
Sadness can improve judgment
Sadness can increase the accuracy of judgment when forming impressions, contributing to more detailed and attentive thinking styles. For example, it is known to reduce common subjective biases such as the fundamental attribution error, where people attribute deliberate behavior to the behavior of others, ignoring situational factors, and the halo effect, where certain positive traits, such as a beautiful face, make us assume that there are not necessarily other positive ones. qualities like kindness and intelligence. Negative mood can also reduce another subjective bias, the primacy effect, where people pay too much attention to early information and ignore later details.
Sadness can boost motivation
When we feel happy, we strive to maintain a feeling of happiness - it signals that we are in a safe familiar situation and that there is no need to make an effort to change something, everything is fine. On the other hand, sadness acts as a mild alarm, increasing motivation and encouraging us to put in more effort to deal with the problem in our environment. A sad mood can increase persistence as people see great potential benefits from their actions.
In some cases, sadness can improve interactions
Overall, happiness increases positive interactions between people. Happy people are more level-headed, assertive, and skillful communicators, they smile more, and are generally considered prettier. However, sadness can help in situations where a more cautious, less assertive, and more considerate communication style is required. Sad people focus more on external cues and will not rely solely on first impressions, which happy people are more likely to trust.
So, sad people are less prone to errors of judgment, more resistant to distortion, sometimes more motivated and more sensitive to social norms. But, of course, sadness has its limits, and this does not mean at all that you need to specifically try to become sad in order to strengthen your memory.
However, mild, temporary states of sadness can be beneficial in various aspects of life. Evolutionary theory suggests that we must accept all of our emotions, as each of them plays an important role in certain circumstances. So as you continue to look for ways to be happier, don't put sadness aside. It's not just that many of the greatest achievements of Western art, music and literature explore the landscape of sadness, but in everyday life, people look for ways to experience this feeling by listening to sad songs, watching sad films and reading sad books.
