Sadness

• 1. Introduction

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  Sadness made Paul Ekman's shortlist. He named six basic emotions, and sadness sits among them alongside happiness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust. It carries a heavy load of cousins: disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment, and sorrow. A person caught in it may fall quiet, grow lethargic, and pull away from everyone around them. Crying can mark its presence. In its severe form it tips into depression, a mood that major depressive disorder or persistent depressive disorder can bring on. But this documentary asks a stranger set of questions. Why might a child need to be allowed to feel sad? What does sadness do to the human voice, and to the size of a person's pupils? And why did a writer of fantasy worlds prize sadness over hope?

• 2. A Child's Right To Grieve

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  Robin Skynner warned about families with an unspoken rule that sadness is "not allowed." When sadness gets screened off, he argued, people can become shallow and manic. The pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton took a gentler line. Acknowledging sadness, he suggested, makes it easier for families to face more serious emotional problems later. Sadness, in this view, belongs to the ordinary machinery of growing up. It is woven into how a child separates from an early symbiosis with the mother and becomes more independent. Each small step away brings a small loss the child must learn to carry. If the mother cannot allow that minor distress, the child may never learn to handle sadness alone. Brazelton cautioned against the reflex to cheer a child up too quickly. Too much cheering, he argued, devalues the emotion of sadness for them. Selma Fraiberg made the case for restraint differently, urging respect for a child's right to experience a loss fully and deeply. Margaret Mahler treated the ability to feel sadness as an emotional achievement, set against warding it off through restless hyperactivity. Donald Winnicott reached even further. In sad crying he saw the psychological root of valuable musical experiences in later life.

• 3. The Sad Brain

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  Seven normal men and women were asked to think about sad things. Researchers using positron emission tomography watched what happened, and found increased brain activity in the bilateral inferior and orbitofrontal cortex. According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, sadness has been tied to increases in bilateral activity near the middle and posterior temporal cortex, the lateral cerebellum, the cerebellar vermis, the midbrain, the putamen, and the caudate. The list of regions is long, and it grows when the method changes. Another study induced sadness by showing emotional film clips. The feeling correlated with significant increases in regional brain activity, especially in the prefrontal cortex, in the region called Brodmann's area 9, and in the thalamus. A significant rise also appeared in the bilateral anterior temporal structures. The same emotion that a parent might try to soothe leaves a wide and measurable signature across the brain.

• 4. What Sadness Is For

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  Functional theories start from a blunt premise: emotions exist to help people deal with the situations that evoke them. Sadness, by this account, serves two primary functions, both aimed at coping with loss. The first is cognitive. Sadness promotes changes that restructure beliefs and goals and force a reevaluation of implications. When sad, people tend to be less governed by their schemas, including schemas about political ideology and the heuristics for how a conservative or a liberal should respond. The second function points outward. Sadness signals a need for assistance and draws support from others. People do this by following group norms, by being kinder, and by asking for help both physically and verbally. Felt together, sadness may decrease emotional polarization and increase relationship building, turning a private ache into a force that binds a group.

• 5. Ways Of Coping

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  Sadness is among the moods people most want to shake, yet it motivates people to deal with their situation. Common coping mechanisms include seeking social support, spending time with a pet, making a list, or finding some activity to express the feeling. Some people, when sad, withdraw from a social setting to take the time they need to recover. The trouble is that the cure can prolong the disease. Sadness is sometimes perpetuated by the very strategies chosen to escape it: ruminating, "drowning one's sorrows," or permanently isolating oneself. Cognitive behavioral therapy offers a different route. It suggests challenging one's negative thoughts, or scheduling a positive event as a distraction. There is also a quieter path. Being attentive to and patient with one's sadness can become a way to learn through solitude, especially with emotional support to help a person stay with the feeling. The belief underneath is hopeful. Loss, when felt wholeheartedly, can lead to a new sense of aliveness and a re-engagement with the outside world.

• 6. The Mirror Of The Pupils

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  Pupil size can betray sadness. A sad facial expression paired with small pupils reads as more intensely sad as those pupils shrink. The effect doubles back on the viewer. A person's own pupils mirror what they see, growing smaller while watching sad faces with small pupils. No such mirroring happens with neutral, happy, or angry expressions. This reflex turns out to be a measure of fellow feeling. The greater the degree to which a person's pupils mirror another's, the higher that person scores on empathy. The link also reveals where it can break down. In disorders such as autism and psychopathy, the facial expressions that represent sadness may be subtle, which may call for a more non-linguistic situation to affect a person's level of empathy.

• 7. The Sound Of Sorrow

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  Swati Johar, a DIPR scientist, calls sadness an emotion "identified by current speech dialogue and processing systems." The voice gives it away through measurable traits. Root mean square energy, inter-word silence, and speaking rate all help distinguish sadness from other emotions. Sadness mostly lowers the mean and variability of the fundamental frequency, the f0, and pairs that with lower vocal intensity and a falling f0 over time. As Johar puts it, "when someone is sad, slow, low pitched speech with weak high audio frequency energy is produced." The low energy state of sadness, she adds, attributes to slow tempo, lower speech rate and mean pitch. Klaus Scherer ranks sadness among the "best-recognized emotions in the human voice," though recognition by voice runs somewhat lower than by face. His numbers show the gap and the cultural spread. In Western countries sadness reached 79% accuracy for facial recognition and 71% for vocal. In Non-Western countries the figures were 74% and 58%.

• 8. Sadness In The Imagination

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  Edmund Spenser, writing during the Renaissance, made sadness a virtue. In The Faerie Queene he endorsed it as a marker of spiritual commitment. J. R. R. Tolkien drew a sharper line. In The Lord of the Rings he distinguished sadness from unhappiness, favoring a sad but settled determination over what he saw as the shallower temptations of either despair or hope. Julia Kristeva found in sorrow a sign of depth rather than defeat. "A diversification of moods, variety in sadness, refinement in sorrow or mourning," she wrote, "are the imprint of a humanity that is surely not triumphant but subtle, ready to fight and creative." The same emotion a family might forbid a child to feel becomes, in these writers' hands, the mark of a mind worth having.