“A Sad Kind Of Happiness”: The Role Of Mixed Emotions In Our Lives

By Emma Young Sometimes, our emotions are one-dimensional. This morning, for example, when both my kids and my dog jumped into bed, I felt happy. During the Halloween party that my husband and I organised for our boys, though, happiness at their pleasure was definitely tinged with anxiety/stress at managing a houseful of rampaging kids. And here we get into murkier emotional territory. While so much research has been done on individual, “basic” emotions, more complex emotional experiences have been neglected. But recent studies have revealed some surprising and special roles for mixed emotions in our lives. What do we feel? One of the most impressive explorations of our everyday feeling experiences was published in 2017 in Emotion Review. The US participants wore a beeper that sounded at random moments. Whenever it went off, they jotted down what, if anything, had just been present in their inner experience. Christopher Heavey at the University of Nevada and colleagues found that most of the time, the participants weren’t feeling anything in particular. When they were, it was usually a single feeling — such as happiness or anxiety. But they did sometimes report experiencing multiple distinct feelings simultaneously, which could involve a negative plus a positive emotion. Sometimes, they also reported single, “blended”, feelings with both positive and negative facets — a “sad kind of happiness”, for example. Of course we ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Feature Source Type: blogs