Psychological research and literary attention to joy are not very extensive. In psychology, there is, in general, more research on negative emotions than on so-called positive emotions. Even among the latter, joy has not received much attention from researchers, who have focused more on the feeling of happiness.
Joy is that momentary emotion that is felt when, all of a sudden, we realize that all things are in their place. Joy is associated with surprise. We feel joy when an unexpected and pleasant event presents itself before us. Joy is found in small gestures, in a ray of sunshine on a gloomy day, or, quoting the philosopher Spinoza, “Joy is a joy accompanied by the idea of a past thing, which happened unexpectedly.”
From this point of view, joy is an emotion that happens. Due to this nature so linked toluck, attention has always been paid to happiness, which on the contrary is a feeling that we can more easily manipulate and build our happiness.
Yet, it is estimated that joy is the most felt emotion during the day.
In our evolution, joy has played an important role in signalling the approach to our goal and prepares our body to spend much more energy to reach the goal. This was an important function, in order to invest in social resources and increase the sense of community.
Contrary to sadness, which helps develop a critical attitude, joy prepares us to consider the opportunities we face.
We are used to associating joy with positive stimuli, which are morally acceptable or useful to the community to which we belong. Like all emotions, joy manifests itself as a result of an unconscious evaluation of the situation we are experiencing. It is not therefore certain that it is a positive or morally desirable event that triggers this feeling. Without disturbing extreme examples, such as the joy felt by the Nazi guards in annihilating the enemy, many of us will certainly have felt an emotion of Schadenfreude, or that subtle joy we feel in witnessing the misfortunes of others.
Doesn’t it seem that literature offers us many other ideas about joy, that it is better to try it than to study it?
Here are some reflection questions for you. Have you ever wondered about the things that bring you joy? Would you have ever said that it is the most felt emotion? Have you ever heard of Schadenfreude? Have you ever felt this way?
In the past couple of years, public debate around mental health and emotions has opened up. In the UK in particular there is much information available about depression and anxiety, and despite that, many of us use the term “depression” in everyday life to describe our state of mind when we feel sad.
This underlines when sadness is an almost alien emotion, something we are no longer used to talking about. In past centuries, sadness was an appreciable and desirable feeling, to the point of becoming a “divine” feeling, a kind of positive mourning given by the awareness of one’s spiritual lack of respect for God.
In the last century, scientific and mainstream theories have spread about the pursuit of happiness, a sort of cult in which the peremptory order is the pursuit of one’s happiness. Furthermore, the theories of positive emotions have emphasized positive emotions, such as joy and happiness, leaving out or demonizing emotions such as sadness or anger.
It is certainly more satisfying to feel joy than sadness. But why, then, is sadness one of the basic emotions? What is so special about it?
There are many theories about the function of sadness, which can coexist or be taken individually. In addition to the emotion of sadness, they also take into account other shades of sadness such as complex emotions and feelings. We will delve into topics such as complex emotions and feelings in future articles.
Before proceeding, I want to emphasize that sadness is different from depression in quality and quantity. Freud, for example, declared that depression, or melancholy, contained feelings of guilt that were unrelated to sadness. Furthermore, if sadness plays an adaptive role, as we will see, depression can be seen as a failure of sadness, the result of which is a state that is maladaptive to life circumstances.
Sadness as protection.
These theories emphasize the safeguard function that this emotion has, and four safeguards have been identified. Sadness is primarily the reaction to a loss. We feel heavy, with little energy and we tend to withdraw from society. The first element is that of alarm. Sadness tells us that when we lose or move away from our community, we will lose energy, thus helping to maintain social cohesion. A second element is that of disengagement. When we unequivocally lose something or someone, sadness and the loss of energy help us to withdraw our energies toward the object or person we have lost and then redirect them to new goals and new goals. The third protective factor is that of conservation, in which we tend to restrict iterations with the outside world when we feel most vulnerable. A sort of narrowing of interests is created, and the energies are used only for essential activities. The fourth element is accuracy. A lot of research has shown that when we are sad we are more sceptical and critical, making us less vulnerable to scams. Not only that, when you are sad, some cognitive skills improve, such as memory and attention to detail, and you are less prone to having false memories.
Sadness is an expression of care.
These theories have highlighted four elements in which sadness plays an important role in healing. The first element they highlight is love. It may seem strange to speak of love in this context, but we can speak of it in terms of absence, in which sadness is the expression of the absence of love. A second element is sadness as a longing desire of the loved one, that sadness given by detachment and impregnated with the hope of a future reunion. This type of sadness testifies to love for others and suffering when the person is absent. Literature, it has inspired poets, artists and writers. Sadness as compassion, on the other hand, emphasizes the empathic ability to feel sadness for the condition of others. Furthermore, sadness has the ability to elicit in others a behaviour of care towards those who feel sad. If we see someone who is sad, we tend to console and support them. People who suffer from depression, unlike those who feel sad, move feelings of frustration, annoyance, revulsion, or anger in others.
As we have seen, sadness, although it is a feeling that we would never like to feel, has had an important function in our evolution by favouring aggregation in groups and caring for others. Some theories also emphasize its importance for our personal and social growth.
Sadness as a flourishing
As we have seen sadness moves one to compassion, but evolutionarily speaking, it could be dictated by one’s interest, such as protecting one’s offspring. Sadness as a moral sensitivity, on the other hand, goes beyond compassion for the people we love or know. This is why many religions promote this feeling of sadness. Sadness, in this case, is seen as a generator of psychological development. Abraham Lincoln is said to have had compassion for the problems of the world, and taking action to address and solve these problems was rewarding. In Buddhism, compassion is a feeling that must be cultivated through meditation, generating personal growth. The sadness we feel after a trauma or illness can be a driver of personal growth. Working with people with cancer, I saw how many saw their disease as an opportunity for personal growth, striving to improve themselves and the communities they were a part of.
In light of this, we can say that sadness is an important emotion, which must be accepted, understood and processed to allow us to grow.
And you? Have you ever wondered about sadness? Here are some questions you might ask yourself.
How in touch are you with your sadness? When was the last time you felt sad? Did you recognize yourself in any of these shades of sadness?
Smith, T. W. (2017). Atlante delle emozioni umane: 156 emozioni che hai provato, che non sai di aver provato, che non proverai mai. Utet.
Lomas, T. (2018). The quiet virtues of sadness: A selective theoretical and interpretative appreciation of its potential contribution to wellbeing. New Ideas in Psychology, 49, 18-26.
Our perception, as well as our emotions, guide and shape the reality in which we move. The emotions and attributions we associate with them guide our future behaviours.
We attribute the label “anger” to that emotion that activates our body, makes us “boil our blood”, clench our fists and make us want to act immediately. As we already know, the physiological activations of different emotions are very similar to each other, so when we attribute the label of anger, we do it based on the situation we are experiencing and our past experiences with this emotion.
Very often, when we talk about anger, destructive scenarios and violence are associated with it. Of course, emotions activate our bodies and somehow prepare us for action. However, it is important to separate the “angry” action from the emotion of anger that one feels. Furthermore, there are so many different ways and different situations in which to act angry. For example, Seneca believed that anger was a vile emotion and that it was unseemly to experience this type of emotion in the streets because it led to unnecessary quarrels and unseemly fights. On the other hand, he believed that the use of this emotion in the war was fundamental, which made soldiers stronger and more ready for action.
The attitude towards this emotion has changed over the centuries. At times the anger was inconvenient, something that was best hidden. On other occasions, however, this emotion was considered essential to keep young or to help patients, after a long debilitating illness, to regain strength and recover completely.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud established that the non-expression of anger could lead to the appearance of physical symptoms. In the therapeutic field, around the 1950s in America, it was considered essential that drug-addicted patients felt a fit of strong anger, even losing their temper, to get rid of the false self and begin the healing process.
Today we have a clearer role of our culture and our experiences in experiencing emotions. Based on the attributions we make, we see reality differently and behave and act differently.
Let’s take a small example. A woman has recently been living with her boyfriend, after many years of engagement. When he leaves the bathroom untidy, she feels a lot of anger. Based on the attributions of the boyfriend’s behaviour, our friend will make different decisions. She might consider that her angry reactions are unmotivated because it is the woman who should look after the house; therefore, she will tend to feel wrong about that emotion. Or she might decide that since her boyfriend grew up in an extremely male-dominated environment, he wasn’t taught to look after the house. In this case, her anger could be directed at his family or be channelled into the feminist political fight. Or, she might think that her boyfriend should pay more attention to her needs, and read his leaving the bathroom messy as disrespectful. In this case, the anger she feels would be directed to assertively asking her boyfriend to fix the bathroom after using it.
In some cultures, anger is an important feeling for moving things. The Ilongot people, a small hunting people in the Philippines, call liget a kind of angry force. In this population, anger, the liget, has a highly positive connotation and allows them to move, hunt and carry out all daily activities.
What causes anger? Anger was an important emotion for our survival. It came to our aid in all those situations in which we had to defend our territory from incursions by animals or other enemy groups who wanted to grab our resources.
But what makes us angry? Generally speaking, we can say that the emotion of anger is triggered when we feel hurt, when our expectations have been disappointed or when our needs have not been met. Feeling anger in these situations helps us change the situation and meet our needs.
When anger is violently acted out it is certainly no longer useful, neither to us nor to others. For example, it is legitimate to get angry because our colleague has taken our parking space. We feel our bodies boil for a moment and feel the need to do something to change the situation. Helpful anger guides us to speak assertively and firmly to the co-worker and berate him for his inappropriate behaviour. If, on the other hand, we decide to smash his car, we will most likely end up fired and the parking space would be the least of our problems. Feeling anger is okay, acting violently is not.
Anger can have different shades, and be triggered by different situations, based on our personal history and our culture of belonging. Do you know what makes you angry?
Here are some simple questions to reflect on this emotion:
What emotion of anger did you feel? (Irritability, frustration, annoyance, anger?)
What thoughts were associated with emotion?
What body sensations have you experienced?
What triggers/situations triggered this emotion?
If you want help exploring your emotions, contact me!
In the previous article, we tried to define emotions. We have learned that these are fast and short-lived changes in physiological functions, accompanied by an emotional experience. Furthermore, we have seen that several theories deal with emotions.
Today let’s look a little more closely at the evolutionary theories on emotions. Evolutionary theories began with Darwin’s observations of facial expressions in primates and emphasize the evolutionary role of emotions.
Several studies have hypothesized the existence of basic emotions, common to all human beings. These theories emphasize the adaptive role of emotions in human development and the role that they have played in our history.
This hypothesis is made because every human being, regardless of the culture they belong to, is capable of distinguishing at least six emotions. If every man on earth experienced emotion, emotion must have played an important role in our evolution.
Ekman, a famous scholar of facial expressions, photographed several Western people as they experienced different emotions. He took these photographs to several people from other cultures, especially oriental cultures, and asked them to describe the emotions they saw. He did the same with a remote population of New Guinea, where newspapers and television had not yet reached. All the populations involved were able to correctly identify six emotions: anger, joy, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise. Ekman and his collaborators found that these emotions were common in all cultures, although they emphasized a strong influence due to the culture they belong to.
The researchers were able to identify that event before the emotions are common to all human beings. The stimuli were identified conceptually, i.e., not listing a precise stimulus, but a concept. For example, it was found that in every culture, people feel sadness when they lose a significant person. Culturally, however, what is meant by a significant person change.
There are several advantages expressed by emotions for our development. First of all, they allow you to be able to relate to other people. Studies have shown that people who suffer from facial paresis and are unable to express their emotions on their faces have a harder time establishing new relationships. Emotions also communicate whether we are safe. For example, if we see another person with a disgusted expression after smelling something, we probably won’t eat it because it could be poisonous. Or, if we imagine ourselves in the forest and see a frightened person, we will prepare ourselves to identify the source of the danger and act accordingly. This is another function of emotions. They prepare our bodies for action. If we are angry, it will most likely be because an obstacle prevents us from reaching the goal (such as, for example, hunting) and body activation helps us to stay focused and to use all the energy necessary to remove the obstacle. When we are scared, our body prepares for action, such as fleeing from danger, attacking it or pretending to be dead to avoid being attacked.
Emotions, therefore, help us understand what is happening and also where we are with the achievement of our goals. Also, Ekman and his researchers have identified that emotions help us in the evaluation. (In the last article we saw how much the unconscious evaluation is crucial in experiencing an emotion). Anger tells us that an obstacle has stood in the way of achieving our goal. Joy signals the achievement of the goal. The sadness that the goal was not achieved or maintained (as above, we did not maintain the relationship with the person who passed away). Fear signals an expectation of failure to achieve the goal.
Evolutionary theories show that emotions “are not requested and not chosen by us” and have to do with past experiences and the predictability of events.
In the next articles, we will explore the basic emotions one by one!
We feel emotions daily, but often we don’t stop to think about how emotions work. If we were to describe how emotions work, the first thing we should do is define emotion: what is emotion? Answering this simple question is not that simple. There are many theories of emotions, and they differ from each other in various aspects, including the definition of what an emotion is.
What scientists agree on is that emotions: 1) have a “multi-system” structure, that is, they involve different structures of our body and brain; and 2) play an important rolein the decisions we make, in the judgments we formulate and in the logical reasoning we implement.
In general, we can define emotion as an intense and short-lived response to a stimulus. The stimulus can be either an external situation or an internal stimulus, such as a thought or a memory.
The intense response concerns both physical activation and the experience that accompanies physical activation. When we get excited, whatever the type of emotion, our body activates and transforms, such as heartbeat, breathing, sweating, vascularization, salivation, pupillary movements and musculature (mimic).
Emotions are an automatic response to a stimulus and each person can experience different emotions in front of the same stimulus. When a response is automatic, it means that it is independent of our will, when we feel an emotion.
It should follow that since emotions are automatic and independent of our will, we are at the mercy of what we feel … But is this so?
The physical activation and the emotional experience that accompanies it, in reality, are quite conscious reactions. Think about the last time you felt embarrassed, and your cheeks turned red, making your mood clear to everyone, or about the last time you felt joy and a smile appeared on your face!
What is automatic, or unconscious, is everything that happens before the emotions manifest. Emotions are strictly connected to the cognitive evaluation we make, unconsciously, of what is happening around us.
In a famous study by Schachter and Singer in 1962, they devised a very ingenious experiment. People who participated in the study were told that the researchers needed to experiment with a mix of vitamins, called suproxin, for vision. For this reason, they were given an injection and would have to wait in the waiting room. In reality, they were given epinephrine, which gave them a physiological activation of arousal. The researchers divided the participants into four groups. The first group, epinephrine-informed, were injected with epinephrine and were told that vitamins could cause physiological activation (such as, for example, increased heart rate, heavy breathing, sweating). The second group, called epinephrine-not-informed, was given epinephrine and told that the vitamins were harmless. The third group, epinephrine-misinformed, was given epinephrine and told that the vitamins could give headaches, drowsiness, or other similar symptoms. Finally, the last group, placebo-uninformed, was injected with a saline solution and told that the substance was harmless. Half of the participants of all four groups were exposed to a cheerful situation. In the waiting room (where an accomplice and a participant in the experiment were present) the accomplice of the experimenters played with the objects in the room, laughed and was visibly in a good mood. The other half of the participants were given a questionnaire with irritating questions, and the accomplice inside the room was altered, up to snatching the questionnaire, railing against the researchers and leaving the room.
From this experiment, it emerged that the two groups, epinephrine-not-informed and epinephrine-misinformed, showed a strong emotional reaction congruent with the situation in which they were assigned. While the other two groups, informed epinephrine and placebo, experienced an attenuated emotional response.
This means that, unconsciously, when we feel an emotion we give an evaluation and a judgment on the situation we are experiencing. The two groups, epinephrine-not-informed and epinephrine-misinformed, attributed the physiological reaction to a wave of strong anger or a strong joy, depending on the situation they were experiencing. The epinephrine-informed group, on the other hand, attributed the strong physical activation to the administration of the vitamin and not to emotion.
There are no specific physiological activations for an emotion. For example, if we have a heart-pounding for a run, we don’t associate any emotion with it. But if noticing the heartbeat, we see the person we like in front of us, we could feel joy, and if the same heartbeat occurs when there is a sudden noise, we could feel fright or surprise. Even in a fraction of a few seconds, we assess the situation or predict events based on the clues available.
Our unconscious evaluations are strongly influenced by our way of seeing life, of approaching the world, of our reference culture and of the system of values that guides us.
Returning, therefore, to our question, we can say that we are not totally at the mercy of our emotions, because they are guided by our values, our culture and the unconscious assumptions and representations we have of the world.
From this, it follows that emotions tell us something about ourselves and at the same time, by acting on our way of thinking and seeing the world we can slowly change our way of feeling. We, therefore, can change how we feel. It is certainly not an instant process, but a journey into our way of seeing and feeling, and in our unconscious.
This year is dedicated to the journey into emotions, to the different nuances and implications.
Dr Vanessa Pozzali 