The Upside of Being Down
Adapted by Sarah Frayne from Sydney Morning Herald article |
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When Professor Joseph Forgas of the University of NSW and his research team asked young people to play a computer game in which they were instructed to shoot at armed targets, they were surprised to identify a "happiness effect".
The research, which was published last year in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that despite being instructed to fire only at those people holding a gun, participants were more likely to make a mistake and shoot at innocent people holding harmless items if the participants mood was classified as “happy”.
In a separate study the researchers also found that mild sadness improved people's recall of everyday events, made them more skeptical and better at detecting deception by others, and less likely to make snap judgments about people based on stereotypes.
"It seems counterintuitive, but a little bit of sadness in some situations can turn out to be a good thing," Forgas says.
In one study Forgas and his colleagues chose a suburban news agency in Sydney to test the influence of positive and negative mood on memory. |
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They placed 10 small items on the counter and then quizzed 73 unsuspecting customers about them as they left the shop.
On cold, wet days, when sombre music was playing, people could list three times as many items than on a sunny day when they heard cheery music, the study found.
"Accurately remembering mundane scenes is a difficult and demanding task, yet such memories can be of crucial importance in everyday life, as well as in forensic and legal practice," Forgas says.
Feeling happy cannot only reduce the accuracy of a witness's memory, it can also make them more susceptible to believing false information, the Sydney psychologists have found.
Mild sadness tends to make people more attentive to the details of their surroundings and have a more careful, thorough thinking style.
Sadness and “time out” to think, may also have helped people learn from their mistakes as well as deterring them from being reckless, suggests Professor Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield in their book The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder.
Horwitz, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, and Wakefield, a professor of social work at New York University also suggest that intense sadness after a major loss may have evolved because it had some sort of survival value.
"As Darwin noted, apes and humans show similar facial expressions in situations that are associated with sadness, including elevated eyebrows, drooping eyelids, horizontal wrinkles across the forehead, and outward extension and drawing down of the lips," they say.
Like us, apes also withdraw socially, stop playing, slouch and even adopt foetal-like postures to cope with the painful emotion.
For these behaviours to have been naturally selected, there must have been special circumstances where the benefits of intense sadness outweighed the costs, Horwitz and Wakefield say.
They liken it to acute pain after an injury, which immobilises people and prevents them doing further damage.
Not only might it have led to a defeated person withdrawing from physical battle in the past, it might help people today accept that some other life goals are unattainable, they say.
Sadness is a natural response to life crises - when people are forced to re-evaluate their futures, a period of sadness might allow the individual to emerge properly motivated by newly selected goals.
Psychiatrists caution that sadness can lead to depression and people should seek treatment for symptoms that concern them.
But the two authors argue that a clear distinction needs to be made between depressive illness and a period of normal sadness after a loss. |
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