The Benefits of Sadness

The original Mood Ring. The color of the stone was alleged to change as the wearer’s mood shifted. Blue indicated the wearer w

Source: Moodman001/Wikimedia Commons

Remember mood rings? It may be good that they’re not “hip” anymore. It’s possible that they would only show how dark our collective mood is in 2022.

Every year a Gallup Poll is sent out, asking adults worldwide about their experiences of negative events in their lives. The results are used to calculate Gallup’s annual Negative Experience Index score. The higher this score, the larger the proportion of the population experiencing worry, stress, and sadness.

The index reached a record high in 2020 (a score of 26); unfortunately, that score only increased in 2021 (peaking at 33). It appears that COVID and its variants have left us sadder and more stressed.

However, the news is not necessarily all bad. Researchers have noted that there may actually be some benefits to being sad.

Mood Valence and Cognition

Research stretching back 50 years has consistently shown that thoughts and emotions interact with one another so that mood influences our cognition. Studies have repeatedly found that mood valence (positive vs. negative moods) is critical to the way that cognition is affected.

Positive valence includes emotions like joy and happiness, while anger and sadness have a negative valence. The valence of the emotional response we have to an event may signal what information processing strategy we need to use in a given situation, influencing not only what we remember but also how we use that memory in problem-solving.

The effect of mood on memory is called mood congruence. Generally, when we’re in a positive mood, we tend to recall positive or pleasant memories, and when we’re in a negative mood, negative memories are easier to access. In addition, when we’re in a negative mood, our evaluations of the world and the other people around us also tend to be negative.

Four of the basic facial expression proposed by Paul Ekman. From left to right, surprise, happiness, anger and sadness.

Source: Gert Germeraad/Wikimedia Commons

One of the more interesting situations in which we can see the effect of mood valence on thinking happens when we’re asked to make judgments about other people in social situations—something that we do routinely.

Bodenhausen et al. (1994) discovered that not all negative moods are equal in the way they influence the social appraisal. They hypothesized that because anger is usually associated with an immediate threat and more often requires fast action, angry people tend to act impulsively and rely more on heuristics.

Heuristics are generalizations, rules-of-thumb, or mental shortcuts that make solving a problem faster and increase the chances of an inaccurate or irrational conclusion. Stereotyping is an example of a well-known heuristic, as is the “halo effect” or the tendency to let a positive or negative first impression of a person color everything else that person says or does.

Sadness, which has a negative valence, is triggered by long-term problems with the circumstances of our lives. Fast action is not the best approach to these sadness-triggering events. Instead, slower, more thoughtful consideration of the problem will result in a better solution.

The Cognitive Benefits of Sadness

Bodenhausen et al. induced either anger, sadness, or a neutral mood in their participants by asking them to recall in detail an event in their lives that had made them feel angry or sad. Neutral group participants described an ordinary event from their lives. Participants were then asked to evaluate the evidence in a case of alleged misconduct by a fellow student. Half the participants read about a fellow student who was a member of a social group stereotypically associated with the type of offense described in the case.

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Angry participants were significantly more likely to use stereotypes to assess the student's guilt. Both sad and neutral participants tended to be more systematic in their assessment of guilt and significantly less reliant on stereotypes compared to angry participants. Interestingly, in a separate study, Bodenhausen found that happy participants also tended to rely on stereotyping in their assessment of guilt in the same way that angry participants had.

These researchers also found that angry people relied more on the apparent expertise of someone trying to persuade them to a particular side of an argument than did sad people. And angry people were more swayed by the alleged trustworthiness of the person communicating an idea, while sad people paid more attention to the argument being made.

This suggests that sadness made people more likely to be thoughtful in their analysis of information in social situations and to pay more attention to the details of the argument being made than angry people. Angry people tended to rely on simple heuristics when evaluating social stimuli.

Maybe the increase in sadness will result in more careful consideration of the problems that face us all. Let’s hope.