Emotions may be fleeting, but sadness lingers longest

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00 UTC

Sadness is the longest lasting of the emotions, finds one of the first ever studies to look at why some emotions last much longer than others.

When compared with being irritated, ashamed, surprised and even bored; it's sadness which outlasts the others.

The study, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, found that sadness tended to be associated with events which had a major long-term impact on people's lives, such as bereavement (Verduyn & Lavrijsen, 2014).

Saskia Lavrijsen, who co-authored the study, explained:

"Rumination is the central determinant of why some emotions last longer than others.

Emotions associated with high levels of rumination will last longest.

Emotions of shorter duration are typically - but, of course, not always - elicited by events of relatively low importance.

On the other hand, long-lasting emotions tend to be about something highly important."

The results come from a survey of 233 students who were asked to recall emotional experiences and how long they had lasted.

Here is the amount of time that each emotion lasted, on average:

At the extremes, while disgust and shame tended to pass within 30 minutes, sadness continued on for an average of 120 hours.

Boredom, meanwhile, tended to pass in a couple of hours, although naturally it feels like longer!

There were also fascinating patterns amongst linked emotions.

For example, fear tended to be short-lived, while its close cousin anxiety lasted much longer.

Similarly, the hot burn of shame passed relatively quickly, but the feeling of guilt tended to hang around much longer.

Comment: Is it really bad to be sad?

When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up."

[..]

Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while," he says. It might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place. The risk of sadness may deter us from being too cavalier in relationships or with other things we value, for example.