Can people feel happy and sad at the same time?

Abstract

The authors investigated whether people can feel happy and sad at the same time. J. A. Russell and J. M. Carroll's (1999) circumplex model holds that happiness and sadness are polar opposites and, thus, mutually exclusive. In contrast, the evaluative space model (J. T. Cacioppo & G. G. Berntson, 1994) proposes that positive and negative affect are separable and that mixed feelings of happiness and sadness can co-occur. The authors both replicated and extended past research by showing that whereas most participants surveyed in typical situations felt either happy or sad, many participants surveyed immediately after watching the film Life Is Beautiful, moving out of their dormitories, or graduating from college felt both happy and sad. Results suggest that although affective experience may typically be bipolar, the underlying processes, and occasionally the resulting experience of emotion, are better characterized as bivariate.

Emodiversity and the emotional ecosystem.

“…A correlation near zero suggests that a person experiences positive and negative affect independently; a negative correlation suggests that they are experienced on a single continuum. Related research on mixed emotions demonstrates that people can experience pleasant and unpleasant emotions at the same time (Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo, 2001;Larsen & McGraw, 2011).…”

Consumer affinity for foreign countries: Construct development, buying behavior consequences and animosity contrasts

“…Though models of affect in psychology typically conceptualize positive and negative affect as diametric opposites (Larsen & Diener, 1992;Russell & Carroll, 1999;Watson & Tellegen, 1999), a study by Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo (2001) found situations where people felt happy and sad simultaneously. Diener & Iran-Nejad (1986) found positive and negative emotions were mutually exclusive at high levels, but they often co-existed at low and moderate levels.…”

Emotional Gratification in Entertainment Experience. Why Viewers of Movies and Television Series Find it Rewarding to Experience Emotions

“…Recent research of Oliver and her colleagues (Oliver, 2008;Oliver, Limparos, Tamul, & Woolley, 2009) has extended the scope of feeling qualities that may account for the appeal of tragic entertainment, highlighting the role of feelings such as tenderness (e.g., tender, kindly, understanding, sympathetic, warm) and meaningful affect (e.g., compassionate, inspired, introspective, and contemplative). Rather than sadness proper, these feelings seem to be characterized by the experience of mixed affect, that is, feeling happy and sad at the same time (cf., Larsen, McGraw, & Cacioppo, 2001).…”