Sadness

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A detail of the 1672 sculpture Entombment of Christ, showing Mary Magdalene crying Sepulcre Arc-en-Barrois 111008 12.jpg
A detail of the 1672 sculpture Entombment of Christ, showing Mary Magdalene crying

Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw themselves from others. An example of severe sadness is depression, a mood which can be brought on by major depressive disorder or persistent depressive disorder. Crying can be an indication of sadness. [1]

Contents

Sadness is one of the six basic emotions described by Paul Ekman, along with happiness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. [2] :271–4

Childhood

Sad girls. Photo by Paolo Monti, 1953 Paolo Monti - Serie fotografica (Venezia, 1953) - BEIC 6363533.jpg
Sad girls. Photo by Paolo Monti, 1953

Sadness is a common experience in childhood. Sometimes, sadness can lead to depression. Some families may have a (conscious or unconscious) rule that sadness is "not allowed", [3] but Robin Skynner has suggested that this may cause problems, arguing that with sadness "screened off", people can become shallow and manic. [4] :33,36 Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton suggests that acknowledging sadness can make it easier for families to address more serious emotional problems. [5] :46,48

Sadness is part of the normal process of the child separating from an early symbiosis with the mother and becoming more independent. Every time a child separates a little more, he or she will have to cope with a small loss. If the mother cannot allow the minor distress involved, the child may never learn how to deal with sadness by themselves. [4] :158–9 Brazelton argues that too much cheering a child up devalues the emotion of sadness for them; [5] :52 and Selma Fraiberg suggests that it is important to respect a child's right to experience a loss fully and deeply. [6]

Margaret Mahler also saw the ability to feel sadness as an emotional achievement, as opposed for example to warding it off through restless hyperactivity. [7] D. W. Winnicott similarly saw in sad crying the psychological root of valuable musical experiences in later life. [8]

Neuroanatomy

A large amount of research has been conducted on the neuroscience of sadness. [9] According to the American Journal of Psychiatry , sadness has been found to be associated with "increases in bilateral activity within the vicinity of the middle and posterior temporal cortex, lateral cerebellum, cerebellar vermis, midbrain, putamen, and caudate." [10] Jose V. Pardo has his M.D and Ph.D and leads a research program in cognitive neuroscience. Using positron emission tomography (PET) Pardo and his colleagues were able to provoke sadness among seven normal men and women by asking them to think about sad things. They observed increased brain activity in the bilateral inferior and orbitofrontal cortex. [11] In a study that induced sadness in subjects by showing emotional film clips, the feeling was correlated with significant increases in regional brain activity, especially in the prefrontal cortex, in the region called Brodmann's area 9, and the thalamus. A significant increase in activity was also observed in the bilateral anterior temporal structures. [12]

Function

According to functional theories, emotions are designed to allow people to effectively deal with the situations that evoke the emotion. [13] Sadness is believed to serve two primary functions that enhance one's ability to cope with loss. [14] One function is the promotion of cognitive changes that restructure beliefs and goals and reevaluate implications. [15] For instance, when sad, people tend to be less affected by their schemas in general, including schemas regarding political ideology (the heuristic regarding how a conservative or a liberal should respond) when making political decisions. [16] Another function is to signal a need for assistance and elicit support from others. [17] This may be done by following the group norms, being kinder to others, and expressing the need for help physically and verbally. As a result, the experience of sadness as a group may decrease emotional polarization [18] and increase relationship building. [19]

Coping mechanisms

A man expressing sadness with his head in his hands Sadness at the beach.jpg
A man expressing sadness with his head in his hands
A carving of the family of Marija and Petar Skuljevic exhibiting sadness over their deaths Grob Marije i Petra Shkuljvitsha na srbskom praoslavnom groblju u Dubrovniku.jpg
A carving of the family of Marija and Petar Škuljević exhibiting sadness over their deaths

People deal with sadness in different ways, and it is an important emotion because it helps to motivate people to deal with their situation. Some coping mechanisms include: getting social support and/or spending time with a pet, [20] creating a list, or engaging in some activity to express sadness. [21] Some individuals, when feeling sad, may exclude themselves from a social setting, so as to take the time to recover from the feeling.[ citation needed ]

While being one of the moods people most want to shake, sadness can sometimes be perpetuated by the very coping strategies chosen, such as ruminating, "drowning one's sorrows", or permanently isolating oneself. [2] :69–70 As alternative ways of coping with sadness to the above, cognitive behavioral therapy suggests instead either challenging one's negative thoughts, or scheduling some positive event as a distraction. [2] :72

Being attentive to, and patient with, one's sadness may also be a way for people to learn through solitude; [22] while emotional support to help people stay with their sadness can be further helpful. [4] :164 Such an approach is fueled by the underlying belief that loss (when felt wholeheartedly) can lead to a new sense of aliveness, and to a re-engagement with the outside world. [23]

Pupil empathy

Pupil size may be an indicator of sadness. A sad facial expression with small pupils is judged to be more intensely sad as the pupil size decreases. [24] A person's own pupil size also mirrors this and becomes smaller when viewing sad faces with small pupils. No parallel effect exists when people look at neutral, happy or angry expressions. [24] The greater degree to which a person's pupils mirror another predicts a person's greater score on empathy. [25] In disorders such as autism and psychopathy, facial expressions that represent sadness may be subtle, which may show a need for a more non-linguistic situation to affect their level of empathy. [25]

Vocal expression

According to DIPR scientist Swati Johar, [26] :VII sadness is an emotion "identified by current speech dialogue and processing systems". [26] :12 Measurements to distinguish sadness from other emotions in the human voice include root mean square (RMS) energy, inter-word silence and speaking rate. [27] It is communicated mostly by lowering the mean and variability of the fundamental frequency (f0), besides being associated with lower vocal intensity, and with decreases in f0 over time. [28] [29] Johar argues that, "when someone is sad, slow, low pitched speech with weak high audio frequency energy is produced". Likewise, "low energy state of sadness attributes to slow tempo, lower speech rate and mean pitch". [26] :10,13

Sadness is, as stated by Klaus Scherer, one of the "best-recognized emotions in the human voice", although it's "generally somewhat lower than that of facial expression". In a study by Scherer, it was found that in Western countries sadness had 79% of accuracy for facial recognition and 71% for vocal, while in Non-Western countries the results were of 74% and 58%, respectively. [30]

Cultural explorations

Lost in thoughts, by Wilhelm Amberg. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw themselves from others. Wilhelm Amberg In Gedanken versunken.jpg
Lost in thoughts, by Wilhelm Amberg. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw themselves from others.

During the Renaissance, Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene endorsed sadness as a marker of spiritual commitment. [31]

In The Lord of the Rings , sadness is distinguished from unhappiness, [32] to exemplify J. R. R. Tolkien's preference for a sad, but settled determination, as opposed to what he saw as the shallower temptations of either despair or hope. [33]

Julia Kristeva considered that "a diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning are the imprint of a humanity that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight and creative". [34]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion</span> Conscious subjective experience of humans

Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

In psychology, a mood is an affective state. In contrast to emotions or feelings, moods are less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence. In other words, people usually talk about being in a good mood or a bad mood. There are many different factors that influence mood, and these can lead to positive or negative effects on mood.

Sympathy is the perception of, understanding of, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form.

Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.

Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term affect is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.

The facial feedback hypothesis, rooted in the conjectures of Charles Darwin and William James, is that one's facial expression directly affects their emotional experience. Specifically, physiological activation of the facial regions associated with certain emotions holds a direct effect on the elicitation of such emotional states, and the lack of or inhibition of facial activation will result in the suppression of corresponding emotional states.

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when positive or neutral things of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.

The theory of constructed emotion is a theory in affective science proposed by Lisa Feldman Barrett to explain the experience and perception of emotion. The theory posits that instances of emotion are constructed predictively by the brain in the moment as needed. It draws from social construction, psychological construction, and neuroconstruction.

Discrete emotion theory is the claim that there is a small number of core emotions. For example, Silvan Tomkins concluded that there are nine basic affects which correspond with what we come to know as emotions: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, dissmell and disgust. More recently, Carroll Izard at the University of Delaware factor analytically delineated 12 discrete emotions labeled: Interest, Joy, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Self-Hostility, Fear, Shame, Shyness, and Guilt.

The Affect infusion model (AIM) is a theoretical model in the field of human psychology. Developed by social psychologist Joseph Paul Forgas in the early 1990s, it attempts to explain how affect impacts one's ability to process information. A key assertion of the AIM is that the effects of affect tend to be exacerbated in complex situations that demand substantial cognitive processing. In simpler words, as situations become more complicated and unanticipated, mood becomes more influential in driving evaluations and responses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion classification</span> Contrast of one emotion from another

Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints:

  1. that emotions are discrete and fundamentally different constructs
  2. that emotions can be characterized on a dimensional basis in groupings

The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negative affectivity</span> Personality variable

Negative affectivity (NA), or negative affect, is a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Low negative affectivity is characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence, activeness, and great enthusiasm.

The negative-state relief model states that human beings have an innate drive to reduce negative moods. They can be reduced by engaging in any mood-elevating behaviour, including helping behaviour, as it is paired with positive value such as smiles and thank you. Thus negative mood increases helpfulness because helping others can reduce one's own bad feelings.

Affect measures are used in the study of human affect, and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.

Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, "as experienced, recalled, anticipated or imagined at first hand". Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. In contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. Therefore, the development of social emotions is tightly linked with the development of social cognition, the ability to imagine other people's mental states, which generally develops in adolescence. Studies have found that children as young as 2 to 3 years of age can express emotions resembling guilt and remorse. However, while five-year-old children are able to imagine situations in which basic emotions would be felt, the ability to describe situations in which social emotions might be experienced does not appear until seven years of age.

Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others, in addition to biological and physiological processes involved. Emotions are typically viewed as having three components: subjective experience, physical changes, and cognitive appraisal; emotion perception is the ability to make accurate decisions about another's subjective experience by interpreting their physical changes through sensory systems responsible for converting these observed changes into mental representations. The ability to perceive emotion is believed to be both innate and subject to environmental influence and is also a critical component in social interactions. How emotion is experienced and interpreted depends on how it is perceived. Likewise, how emotion is perceived is dependent on past experiences and interpretations. Emotion can be accurately perceived in humans. Emotions can be perceived visually, audibly, through smell and also through bodily sensations and this process is believed to be different from the perception of non-emotional material.

In cognitive psychology, the affect-as-information hypothesis, or 'approach', is a model of evaluative processing, postulating that affective feelings provide a source of information about objects, tasks, and decision alternatives. A goal of this approach is to understand the extent of influence that affect has on cognitive functioning. It has been proposed that affect has two major dimensions, namely affective valence and affective arousal, and in this way is an embodied source of information. Affect is thought to impact three main cognitive functions: judgement, thought processing and memory. In a variety of scenarios, the influence of affect on these processes is thought to be mediated by its effects on attention. The approach is thought to account for a wide variety of behavioural phenomena in psychology.

Contagious depression is "a theory proposing that depression can be induced or triggered by our social environment". This is a form of emotional and social contagion, or mass psychogenic illness, that psychologists such as Fritz Redl and Ladd Wheeler have long studied. Similar to social contagion it presents itself in two ways: behavioral contagion and emotional contagion. Behavioral is based on physical changes in a person's actions while emotional has to do with a person's mood. This phenomenon is similar to the concept of an "empath" in the way that someone's emotions affect another person. Many studies also show that the mere proximity a person has to someone with depression the more likely they are to get it. This is because of the idea of "mirror neuron systems". This idea shows that people internalize and process the emotions of others as their own and end up transmitting this learned emotion to others.

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Further reading