Everyone experiences a vast range of emotions in their lives. The ability to identify one’s feelings is important for a healthy emotional life and well-being because it encourages self-reflection and regulation. Therefore, it is important to understand how to recognize your current psychological state with distinguishing features, which differentiate the subtypes within major emotions. To explore different subtypes of a major emotion, sadness, Shirai and colleagues (2021) investigated crying-related words and behavioral features associated with people’s conceptualization of  loss- and failure- sadness.

The researchers conducted two studies to elucidate the features that distinguish loss-sadness and failure-sadness. The purpose of Study 1 was to examine if the sadness subtypes are perceived as different concepts based on features that relate to crying. 70 undergraduate students rated the similarities of 32 crying-related Japanese onomatopoeias (words that imitate sounds) to the emotional contexts of loss (funeral) and failure (failure to pass a university entrance exam) on a 7-point Likert scale (1- does not fit, 7- fits very well). For example, “boro boro (crying with large tears)” and “en en (person cry with loud voice)”. The 32 words were separated into three groups: high-, middle-, and low-fitting based on word-pair correlations after conducting data analysis.

Study 2 investigated the behavioral features that distinguish the sadness contexts. There were 22 university students and the researchers prepared 36 sentences (9 words by 4 behavioral properties) to test behavioral activation properties: dynamic and voice features of crying. The participants recorded whether crying behavior was dynamic (“I strongly cried”) or static (“I quietly cried”), and whether crying occurred with vocalization (“I cried out loudly”) or not (“I sobbed”). They also used a 7-point Likert scale to rate the congruence between the sentences containing the words used in Study 1, and behavioral properties (1- incongruence, 7- congruence).

The researchers found that the middle-fitting group consisted of words that were more congruent for the loss context, while others were congruent for the failure context. Additionally, the high-fitting words showed congruency for both loss- and failure-sadness contexts, while low-fitting words showed incongruent responses, which did not distinguish the different types of sadness. This suggests that sadness is specifically conceptualized and correlated to certain emotion-related words. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrated that the behavioral activation properties (dynamic, static, voice) contrasted the features between loss-sadness and failure-sadness. Loss-sadness was associated with static features, while failure-sadness was associated with dynamic and voice properties. Thus, the different subtypes of sadness are also internalized as distinct concepts in behavioral activation features.

Shirai and colleagues’ findings help enhance people’s emotional awareness of sadness and its subtypes. For instance, people who experienced a recent loss (e.g. “loss of someone”) and a failure (e.g. “failure to achieve a goal”) would be able to identify the differences in their sadness and take appropriate regulation strategies to cope with the emotional situations. EPIC can also investigate the relationship between one’s motivation to persist after experiencing the different subtypes of sadness.

To learn more about this study, access the full article here:  https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-48933-001

This post is written by Eliza Hong.

Reference:

Shirai, M., Soshi, T., & Suzuki, N. (2021). Knowledge of Sadness: Emotion-related behavioral words differently encode loss and failure sadness. Current Psychology, 40, 895-909. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-48933-001