Sadness lasts longer than other emotions such as shame or boredom, according to a new Belgian study conducted on high school students.
Goodbye boredom, hello sadness. The novelist Françoise Sagan is not the only one to have seized on melancholy in one of her works. The theme has indeed inspired countless films, novels and songs. And for good reason: of all the emotions, sadness would be the most tenacious.
In any case, this is what a Belgian study published in the American journal suggests. Motivation and Emotion.
“Flash” of emotions
Researchers from the University of Louvain asked 223 high school students to list all their recent emotions, indicating the nature and duration of each one. Among the 27 emotions cited (shame, fear, boredom, disgust, etc.), most of them manifest in the form of “flash”, including that of boredom. With the exception of sadness, which lasts for several days.
Why is sadness the exception to the rule?
In adolescents who have recently experienced sadness, the feeling was systematically associated with the loss of a loved one (death, accident), and therefore with a situation of mourning. The important and traumatic nature of the event experienced would therefore characterize the feeling felt. “Ceaselessly rehashing an event in your mind accentuates the emotion and makes it last longer”, concludes Professor Philippe Verduyn, one of the main authors of the study.
This would explain why the feeling of boredom is shorter than that of melancholy, as Professor Saskia Lavrijssen, co-author of the study demonstrates. “Even if time passes slowly when you are bored, the episode of boredom itself is relatively short and is more easily forgotten than a feeling generated by a sad situation.” But this theory does not of course apply only to that of sadness. As such, the feeling of guilt can also, in certain situations, prove to be extremely persistent.
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