Paradoxically, the experience of sadness may also lead to pleasant affective states. For instance, listening to sad music is often described as an enjoyable and a ‘moving’ experience (Sachs et al., 2015), especially when perceived as non-threatening and aesthetically pleasing.

educed cortical activation

It is an adaptive emotion that may have been conserved by evolution along the phylum as it has an adaptive function, allowing us to cope with losses such as losing resources, status, friends, children or romantic partners (Nesse, 1990).

Crying-related sadness is associated with increased heart rate and increased skin conductance (Gross et al., 1994), while noncrying sadness is associated with a reduction in heart rate, reduced skin conductance, and increased respiration (Gross et al., 1994; Rottenberg et al., 2003).

The characteristic facial expression of sadness contribute to what Charles Darwin described as the 'grief muscles', including the “omega melancholicum” and Veraguth’s folds (Greden et al., 1985).

In humans, sadness is characterised by specific behaviours (social withdrawal, lower reward seeking, slow gait), a typical facial expression (drooping eyelids, downcast eyes, lowered lip corners, slanting inner eyebrows), physiological changes (heart rate, skin conductance) as well as cognitive/subjective processes.

According to the situated-cognition model, humans instinctively adapt their self-representation to their sociocultural context. This means that specific cultural environments reinforce particular social, emotional, and cognitive patterns of behavior (Oyserman, 2011). This is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to emotion, which... See more

Chronic sadness is often (mis)diagnosed as a depressive disorder (Horwitz and Wakefield, 2007), and parallel bodies of literature linked psychological distress and depressive disorder to higher risk of chronic physical conditions (Bhattacharya et al., 2014) and premature mortality (Russ et al., 2012), with effects comparable to or larger than the... See more

Sadness is typically characterized by raised inner eyebrows, lowered corners of the mouth, reduced walking speed, and slumped posture