Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings. Claudia Hammond

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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_a18eb27b-f609-5261-ac0f-9b98f67ea6cb">Two Sadness

      Airports are not supposed to be sad places. People are off on ‘the holiday of a lifetime’, ‘a dream honeymoon’ or a gap year ‘finding themselves’. Wherever I’m heading I find myself looking up at the departure screens, imagining which flight I’d board if I could choose: will it be Kuala Lumpur or Moscow, Lima or Nairobi? But this is just my experience. Airports aren’t always happy places.

      

      A woman walks slowly towards the automatic glass doors carrying a soft black bag on her shoulder and a linen jacket wedged in the crook of her elbow. She looks back, slightly embarrassed, aware that others are watching. Lifting her arm, she waves hesitantly at her family who stand with their mouths turned down. Their eyes are already wet. She shows her boarding pass to the man at the desk and walks through the doors ready to snake her way to the x-ray machines. Her family wait for the final glimpse, then put their arms around each other in comfort. For a while they stand still. How long should they wait? They turn and head slowly for the car park, not noticing a young man watching grimly as his pretty girlfriend passes through the same doorway. Will she still be his after a year’s backpacking? A party of ten or twelve are seeing off an elderly Indian woman carrying two vast, checked shopping bags. The toddler is busy running straight into the stretchy barrier and bouncing back off it, but everyone else in the group is crying. Will this be the last time they see her? The stories of all these visitors to the departure lounge are very different, but they’re all sharing the same emotion – sadness.

      

      When someone else read this description they said that imagining those people made them feel sad, but in fact I’d made these stories up. Nevertheless my friend was experiencing that strangely enjoyable sadness you get if you watch a sentimental film. The next time I was at an airport, instead of pondering where to go, I looked around for the sadness and there was plenty. This time it was genuine.

      Real sadness, imagined sadness and a slightly luxurious, voyeuristic sadness – this is an emotion which can work at different levels. A little sadness can be quite pleasurable. If you look back at happy times, you might feel sad that a part of life is over, never to be retrieved, but at the same time it’s a warm, nostalgic sadness, free from despair. Melancholy music can have the same effect and we choose to listen to it specifically because it prompts an indulgently enjoyable sadness. In fact over the centuries sadness hasn’t always been seen as a negative emotion. In her work on diaries from seventeenth-century England the researcher Carol Barr-Zisowitz found pride in the feeling of sadness. It was even considered to be the opposite of sinfulness; if you were sad you were seen as patient and wise, despite your difficulties. She also notes that in some societies sadness can have the same effect today. In Iran and Sri Lanka for example a degree of melancholy is taken as an indication of a person’s depth.

      Even in cultures where sadness is on the whole perceived to be negative, the absence of this feeling can be seen as problematic. A life spent feeling ceaselessly happy due to the drug soma was part of Aldous Huxley’s nightmare vision of the future in Brave New World. You could argue that if you never felt miserable then neither could you ever feel true happiness. However, we wouldn’t consider a life without illness to be a problem, despite a lack of contrast with good health. In fact when you feel ill the idea of feeling well again seems blissful, but after only a day or two of good health it’s easy to forget how good you feel. Just as it’s hard to appreciate every moment of well-being, it is hard to relish the absence of sadness.

      In this chapter I’ll be exploring why a sad face expresses so much and what happens in the brain when we’re feeling sad, as well as the chemical secrets held within that strange symptom of sadness, crying. First it is necessary to understand the purpose of sadness and its close but more complex relation, depression.

      the purpose of sadness

      ‘You just can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. You feel so helpless. There’s just a big void. You can’t even remember what it’s like to feel happy. At first you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t know why you’re crying all the time. You go onto a different level. You can laugh with people, but it’s a superficial laughter that starts in your head and only goes down to your neck.’

      

      When I knew Chloe at school she had always been happy, pretty and popular, but when she was in her early thirties the end of a relationship was followed by a particularly stressful period at work. Suddenly she found herself bursting into tears without warning. ‘When it first happens it hits really hard. You forget about food. It’s too much effort. I remember being upset because my room was untidy but I just didn’t have the energy to tidy it. I phoned my mum and she said she’d come and help me. My bedroom was right next to the front door, but just getting up to let her in made me feel so tired that I had to go straight back to bed. It was very different from just feeling sad, but I think only people who’ve been through it can understand that. Other people think you could do something constructive, if only you tried, but it’s impossible. You feel such a failure and so guilty for not being able to do anything. You just feel useless and you take everything personally. You feel a complete burden, but you can’t even explain it to people properly.’

      When depression can become this painful, it raises the question of why sadness evolved at all. Although we vary in our tendency to feel sad, we all feel it, which suggests that it is either an accidental by-product of evolution or that it serves a distinct purpose. It does have to be remembered, however, that evolution takes no account of our pain; natural selection concerns the provision of a life where we can survive long enough to reproduce successfully. The purpose is not to furnish us with a life that’s happy nor even healthy. Despite this, it is hard to see where sadness fits in. It paralyses people, preventing them from succeeding at work or finding partners, let alone reproducing. As we saw in the chapter on joy, a person who feels happy continues to pursue those activities which bring them joy, whether that entails remaining in a relationship or working hard at a job they like. Happiness or even the possibility of future happiness spurs us on. Sadness does the opposite. It can slow a person down to the extent where they stop working; they cease seeking other people’s company; or they even stay in bed. People with clinical depression struggle to find the will to start anything new at what appears to be the exact time that extra energy is needed to make major life-changes. The cognitive scientist, Keith Oatley, believes that we experience strong emotions when we face a crossing point; their purpose is to act as a bridge to the next step in life. Whether or not we decide to change direction is irrelevant. Sadness concentrates the attention, forcing us to stop and take stock. The problem with this theory is that although people do slow down and isolate themselves when they’re feeling sad, they don’t necessarily spend a lot of time deep in self-examination. In one study people were asked how they tended to behave if they were feeling sad. The most popular answers were listening to music or taking a nap. Scrutinising one’s life did not come high on the list.

      Taking the idea even further, the American psychiatrist, Randolph Nesse, argues that the function of sadness is to control our energy levels. The idea is that if our chances of success on a project are low, on some level we realise this and start to feel miserable. Then we lose energy and motivation and abandon the project, which saves us from wasting time on something fruitless. It’s even been argued that the treatment of depression with drugs might artificially rid us of a useful emotion.

      In some ways this theory does sound plausible, but extreme depression can lead to suicide, hardly an ideal way for evolution to continue the species. In the UK and Republic of Ireland somebody commits suicide every eighty-two minutes. Moreover, not everyone who becomes depressed is following a course which is doomed to end in failure. Sometimes it is the onset of the depression itself which ruins a person’s chances of success. Maybe it’s the case that a little sadness can be useful, but for a few СКАЧАТЬ