Why Sadness Seems to Go On and On and On
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iStock/Thinkstock(LEUVEN, Belgium) — If you’re unhappy and you know it, clasp your hands and then try to figure out why sadness seems to linger much longer than all other emotions.
Actually, researchers Philippe Verduyn and Saskia Lavrijsen at the University of Leuven in Belgium have done the work for you and their conclusion is that sadness is often associated with traumatic events of lasting consequence such as death, divorce or job loss.
To conduct their study, Verduyn and Lavrijsen had 200 high school students recount various emotions and their duration.
Measured against 26 other emotions, sadness hung around the longest. As a matter of fact, it can last up to 240 times longer than such emotions as fear, disgust or irritation, which come and go quickly because they’re generally linked to incidents of relative unimportance.
Another interesting finding is that duration is the chief difference between similar emotions, which explains why guilt and anxiety will preoccupy people longer than shame and fear.
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