Is Sadness Only One Emotion? Psychological and Physiological Responses to Sadness Induced by Two Different Situations: “Loss of Someone” and “Failure to Achieve a Goal”

Abstract

We investigated whether sadness elicited by two different situations—loss of someone (loss) and failure to achieve a goal (failure)—had different physiological responses. Seventy-four participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions (loss, failure, and neutral). Physiological responses were recorded during an imagery task that was designed to evoke sadness. The results of characteristics in the subjective ratings indicated that loss-evoked sadness was only associated with expressive words relating to tears. For the results of physiological measures, skin conductance levels (SCLs) increased during the imagery task across all conditions and differed between conditions during the post-task. For the loss condition, restoration to baseline level took longer, while in the failure the SCL decreased sharply back to baseline. Furthermore, tear ratings correlated with blood pressures in the loss condition, while sadness intensity correlated with blood pressures in the failure condition. These results suggest that sadness includes at least two subtypes that produce different responses in subjective ratings and physiological measures.

Why is heartache associated with sadness? Sadness is represented by specific physical pain through verbal knowledge

“…Zukin zukin (continuous throbbing pain) is another expression for throbbing pain, and is related to loss-situations; specifically, zukin zukin represents incessant throbbing pain. Loss-sadness yields a continuous arousal response [16] and, when it is prolonged, often leads to depressive symptoms [55]. The continuous nature of the term provides the psychological basis for the high congruency between zukin zukin and loss-sadness.…”

“…Four basic emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and fear) were selected based on the previous study [41]. Emotional feeling is occasionally represented by referring to somatic sensations; notably, as mentioned above, feelings of sadness are commonly represented by pain-related expressions such as “heart ache” [16].…”

“…Among various related features, such as external triggering events and subjective or psychophysiological responses [6–9], bodily expressions construct the emotions [10, 11], as per William James’s viewpoint of the association between emotion and bodily response [12]. In fact, the behavioral expression “heartache” is frequently utilized as a sadness-expressive word in describing loss of loved one or social rejection [13–16]. Based on autonomic physical-response properties, sadness can be divided into subtypes, such as loss and failure.…”

“…Based on autonomic physical-response properties, sadness can be divided into subtypes, such as loss and failure. Though both loss- and failure-sadness increase the skin conductance responses, for loss-sadness, it takes longer for the levels to return to normal than that for failure-sadness [16]. Loss- and failure-sadness are also conceptualized differently based on their physical-activation properties [3]: loss-sadness is associated with less-overt physical actions, which are performed to cope with psychological damage [17, 18]; on the other hand, failure-sadness is associated with overt behaviors, which are performed to achieve goals [19, 20].…”

“…In particular, sadness can occur in response to social events such as social rejection, homesickness, or loss (e.g., loss of loved one) [26], which occur during interactions of the body with the social environment. Actually, sadness comprising loss- and failure-sadness [15, 16] is represented differently in verbal concepts based on their physical-activation features [3], and can induce different autonomic physiological responses [16]. Thus, sadness possesses properties of interaction between the social situations and body.…”