Neuroscience
We spend most of our lives trying to be as happy as possible, but a team of researchers in Israel has explored how we sometimes appear to find, if not pleasure exactly, at least a certain satisfaction in sharing moments of sadness with others.
To investigate this phenomenon, Roni Porat and her team focused on Jewish-Israeli people's expectations around Israeli National Memorial Day. The day is used to commemorate Israeli soldiers who died in service as well as civilians killed by terrorism.
Based on surveys of Jewish-Israeli undergrads, the researchers found that people who were more motivated to belong (they agreed with statements like "It is important for me to feel a part of the Israeli society"), also tended to say they wanted to feel sad on Memorial Day, and they expected this sadness to make them feel closer to their country.
Porat's team followed this up by deliberately prompting the need to belong in Jewish-Israeli participants recruited online. The researchers did this by asking the participants to look at pairs of photos of faces and to indicate in each case which face belonged to a Jewish-Israeli and which to a Palestinian; this was followed by fixed feedback so that the participants thought they'd failed to identify members of their own ethnic group. Compared to control participants, those made to feel inadequate had raised hopes for feeling sad (but not other emotions) on Memorial Day.
It was a similar story for participants who were prompted to want to belong by having them read about the basic human need for feeling part of a larger social group. After reading such arguments, participants had raised wishes for feeling sad on Memorial Day.
Porat and her colleagues said this is the first time that anyone has studied how the need to belong shapes people's preferences for the emotions they want to feel. The new results extend past research that's shown how people deliberately influence their own emotions for individual (rather than social) reasons – for example, fostering anger in themselves as an aid to aggression.
It remains to be seen how far the results will generalise beyond the specific contexts of this study. If they do, real-world applications might follow. For example, as with sadness, it's plausible that people sometimes seek out group anger as a way to feel greater belonging with their national or religious group. By helping people feel a greater sense of belonging in other ways, the researchers said, it might be possible to reduce the appeal of group anger thereby helping reduce hostility between different social groups.
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Porat, R., Halperin, E., Mannheim, I., & Tamir, M. (2015). Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness. Cognition and Emotion, (ahead-of-print), 1-14.
--further reading--
Why do people like listening to sad music when they're feeling down?
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Why do we sometimes like getting sad together?
To investigate this phenomenon, Roni Porat and her team focused on Jewish-Israeli people's expectations around Israeli National Memorial Day. The day is used to commemorate Israeli soldiers who died in service as well as civilians killed by terrorism.
Based on surveys of Jewish-Israeli undergrads, the researchers found that people who were more motivated to belong (they agreed with statements like "It is important for me to feel a part of the Israeli society"), also tended to say they wanted to feel sad on Memorial Day, and they expected this sadness to make them feel closer to their country.
Porat's team followed this up by deliberately prompting the need to belong in Jewish-Israeli participants recruited online. The researchers did this by asking the participants to look at pairs of photos of faces and to indicate in each case which face belonged to a Jewish-Israeli and which to a Palestinian; this was followed by fixed feedback so that the participants thought they'd failed to identify members of their own ethnic group. Compared to control participants, those made to feel inadequate had raised hopes for feeling sad (but not other emotions) on Memorial Day.
It was a similar story for participants who were prompted to want to belong by having them read about the basic human need for feeling part of a larger social group. After reading such arguments, participants had raised wishes for feeling sad on Memorial Day.
Porat and her colleagues said this is the first time that anyone has studied how the need to belong shapes people's preferences for the emotions they want to feel. The new results extend past research that's shown how people deliberately influence their own emotions for individual (rather than social) reasons – for example, fostering anger in themselves as an aid to aggression.
It remains to be seen how far the results will generalise beyond the specific contexts of this study. If they do, real-world applications might follow. For example, as with sadness, it's plausible that people sometimes seek out group anger as a way to feel greater belonging with their national or religious group. By helping people feel a greater sense of belonging in other ways, the researchers said, it might be possible to reduce the appeal of group anger thereby helping reduce hostility between different social groups.
_________________________________
Porat, R., Halperin, E., Mannheim, I., & Tamir, M. (2015). Together we cry: Social motives and preferences for group-based sadness. Cognition and Emotion, (ahead-of-print), 1-14.
--further reading--
Why do people like listening to sad music when they're feeling down?
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Guilt Is Catching
Shaking hands with a cheat or thief, or merely sitting in a chair they used, is likely to make you experience feelings of guilt. That's according to a new study, the first to demonstrate "moral transfer" between people. Kendall Eskine and his colleagues...
- How Happiness Campaigns Could End Up Making Us Sadder
Founded in 2010, the Action for Happiness movement states: "What we want for our society is as much happiness as is possible and, above all, as little misery". These aims are well-intentioned, but a new study shows public campaigns like this could have...
- How Anger Can Make Us More Rational
Anger can de-bias our thinkingImagine you're in a room with four people, one is lip-snarling angry, the others are calm. Who among them would you consider the most likely to think rationally? A surprising new study suggests that in at least one important...
- Of Cats And Basketball Players - How We're Better At Recognising The Emotions Of Those We Identify With
Just as we’re better at recognising people who share our ethnicity, we are also better at interpreting the emotional facial expressions of people from the same ethnic, national, or regional group as ourselves. Pascal Thibault and colleagues at the University...
- Why Do We Still Believe In Group Brainstorming?
So you need some fresh, innovative ideas. What do you do? Get a group of your best thinkers together to bounce ideas of each other…? No, wrong answer. Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in...