ABSTRACT
Sadness is little studied in psychology. This failure is surprising given its widespread portrayal in art, the cinema, music, and literature. Instead, the more extreme variants of sadness such as grief, bereavement, and mourning, or disorders derived from sadness such as depression have dominated psychological study (cf. Barr-Zisowitz, 2000). The focus on the extreme and the abnormal may perhaps represent something of our cultural ambivalence towards sadness and its expression, although we will try to hold back from such wild interpretations, at least until later. We must note, though, that much of what we think about as sadness should more correctly be viewed as sadness combined with other basic emotions such as fear, anger, or disgust. For example, a common procedure used to study “sadness” in the psychology laboratory is to use a mood induction procedure such as the Velten card technique (Velten, 1968) in which the participant reads through a list of statements along the lines of “I’m worthless”, “I’m a failure”, and so on. Such lists encourage a state of self-criticism, which, as Freud emphasised in his classic work Mourning and Melancholia (1917), is a feature that distinguishes melancholia from mourning rather than representing a defining feature of it. Much mood induction work therefore may have studied sadness combined with disgust (directed towards the self) rather than sadness itself, although we would note in passing that studies of threat may have made similar errors and included many disgust-related stimuli (see Chapter 9).
