- These types of emotions are unpleasant to experience and can even feel overwhelming.
- In fact, in psychology experiments, people will pay money to not feel many negative emotions.
- But recent research is revealing that emotions can be useful, and even negative emotions can bring benefits.
Sadness can help you recover from a failure
- Once evoked, sadness is associated with what psychologists call a deactivation state of doing little, without much behavior or physical arousal.
- The benefit of the stopping and thinking that comes with sadness is that it helps people recover from failure.
- Sadness can function differently when there’s the possibility that the failure could be avoided if other people help.
- Expressing sadness, through tears or verbally, has the benefit of potentially recruiting other people to help you achieve your goals.
Anger prepares you to overcome an obstacle
- The obstacle could be an injustice committed by another person, or it could be a computer that repeatedly crashes while you’re trying to get work done.
- Once evoked, anger is associated with a “readiness for action,” and your thinking focuses on the obstacle.
- Expressing anger, facially or verbally, has the benefit of prompting other people to clear the way.
Anxiety helps you prepare for danger
- Once evoked, anxiety is associated with being prepared to respond to danger, including increased physical arousal and attention to threats and risk.
- The eye-widening that often comes with fear and anxiety even gives people a wider field of vision and improves threat detection.
- Anxiety prepares the body for action, which improves performance on a number of tasks that involve motivation and attention.
Boredom can jolt you out of a rut
- Boredom appears to occur when someone’s current situation is not causing any other emotional response.
- Psychology researchers think that the benefit of boredom in situations where people are not responding emotionally is that it prompts making a change.
- Boredom has been related to more risk seeking, a desire for novelty, and creative thinking.
Using the toolkit of emotion
- But research is finding that a satisfying and productive life includes a mix of positive and negative emotions.
- Negative emotions, even though they feel bad to experience, can motivate and prepare people for failure, challenges, threats and exploration.
Heather Lench does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
