Knowledge of Sadness: Emotion-related behavioral words differently encode loss and failure sadness

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

“…Such emotional concepts are composed of a set of features [2], which function as a unified concept in not only distinguishing major emotional concepts such as sadness and happiness, but also discriminating between subtypes within the same major emotion (e.g. [3]). Such feature-based representation of emotional concepts is fundamental for constructing “knowledge of emotion” as a collection of emotional concepts, which enables us to identify our own and others’ emotional states in daily situations [3, 4].…”

“…[3]). Such feature-based representation of emotional concepts is fundamental for constructing “knowledge of emotion” as a collection of emotional concepts, which enables us to identify our own and others’ emotional states in daily situations [3, 4]. Sadness-pain concept, therefore, is assumed to possess overlapping features, which probably makes it possible to express sadness as well as physical pains.…”

“…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]. Physical pain in specific body parts is communicated to the brain through nociception [21, 22], and this motivates organisms to avoid the triggering threat and move to safety [14].…”

“…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.…”

“…They typically function as a modifier of predicates or nouns such as adverbs and adjectives and can vividly represent subtle differences and nuances of expressions [33]. For example, crying-related onomatopoeias can effectively represent different types of crying behaviors, such as overt (e.g., “ boro boro ” represents crying with large amounts of tears) and less-overt expressions (e.g., “ shiku shiku ” represents soft weeping) [3]. Pain-related onomatopoeias also selectively represent specific types of pains, distinguishing subtle differences in pain properties (Onomatope Lab: http://onomatopelabo.jp/index.html?medical); for example, some of these onomatopoeias are associated with headaches (e.g., “ gan gan ”: pain or noise echoing in the head), while others are associated with back pain (e.g., “ jin jin ”: incessant pain and numbness in the afflicted area).…”