Homo sapiens is a very moody species. Even though sadness and bad moods have always been part of the human experience, we now live in an age that ignores or devalues these feelings.
In our culture, normal human emotions like temporary sadness are often treated as disorders. Manipulative advertising, marketing, and self-help industries claim happiness should be ours for the asking. Yet bad moods remain an essential part of the normal range of moods we regularly experience.
Despite the near-universal cult of happiness and unprecedented material wealth, happiness and life satisfaction in Western societies has not improved for decades. It’s time to re-assess the role of bad moods in our lives. We should recognize they are a normal and even useful and adaptive part of being human, helping us cope with many everyday situations and challenges.
A short history of sadness
In earlier historical times, short spells of feeling sad or moody (known as mild dysphoria) have always been accepted as a normal part of everyday life. In fact, many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit deal with evoking, rehearsing, and even cultivating negative feelings.
Geek tragedies exposed and trained audiences to accept and deal with inevitable misfortune as a normal part of human life. Shakespeare’s tragedies are classics because they echo this theme, and the works of many great artists such as Beethoven and Chopin in music or Chekhov and Ibsen in literature explore the landscape of sadness, a theme long recognized as instructive and valuable.
Ancient philosophers have also believed accepting bad moods is essential to living a full life. Even hedonist philosophers like Epicurus recognized living well involves exercising wise judgement, restraint, self-control, and accepting inevitable adversity. Other philosophers like the stoics also highlighted the importance of learning to anticipate and accept misfortunes, such as loss, sorrow, or injustice.
Why do we get sad?
Psychologists who study how our feelings and behaviors have evolved over time maintain all our affective states (such as moods and emotions) have a useful role: They alert us to states of the world we need to respond to. In fact, the range of human emotions includes many more negative than positive feelings. Negative emotions such as fear, anger, shame, or disgust are helpful because they help us recognize, avoid, and overcome threatening or dangerous situations.
Feeling sad or in a bad mood produces a number of benefits:
Better memory: In one study, a bad mood (caused by bad weather) resulted in people remembering better. the details of a shop they just left. Bad mood can also improve eyewitness memories by reducing the effects of various distractions, like irrelevant, false, or misleading information.
More accurate judgements: A mild bad mood also reduces some biases and distortions in how people form impressions. For instance, slightly sad judges formed more accurate and reliable impressions about others because they processed details more effectively. We found that bad moods also reduced gullibility and increased skepticism when evaluating urban myths and rumors, and even improved people’s ability to more accurately detect deception. People in a mild bad mood are also less likely to rely on detected stereotypes.
Motivation: Other experiments found that when happy and sad participants were asked to perform a difficult mental task, those in a bad mood tried harder and preserved more. They spent more time on the task, attempted more questions, and produced more correct answers.
Better communication: The more attentive and detailed thinking style promoted by a bad mood can also improve communication. We found people in a sad mood used more effective persuasive argument to convince others, were better at understanding ambiguous sentences, and better communicated when taking.
Increased fairness: Other experiments found that a mild bad mood caused people to pay greater attention to social expectations and norms, and they treated others less selfishly and more fairly.
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