Is it really bad to be sad?
Jessica Marshall
[...]"When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn't have been burdened with it," says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). "We're fooling around with part of our biological make-up."
Hard evidence for the importance of sadness in humans is difficult to come by, but there are lots of ideas about why our propensity to feel sad might have evolved. It may be a self-protection strategy, as it seems to be among other primates that show signs of sadness. An ape that doesn't obviously slink off after it loses status may be seen as continuing to challenge the dominant ape - and that could be fatal.
Wakefield believes that in humans sadness has a further function: it helps us learn from our mistakes. "I think that one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning, to make us focus on something else for a while," he says. It might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place. The risk of sadness may deter us from being too cavalier in relationships or with other things we value, for example.[...]
Handbook of emotions
Michael Lewis,Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones,Lisa Feldman Barrett
[...]A key adaptive function of sadness is to promote personal reflection following the irrevocable loss of a person or object of importance to the self. The experience of sadness turns our attention inward, promoting resignation and acceptance. Physiological arousal is decreased, allowing for a “time out” to update cognitive structures and to accommodate lost objects. The reflective function of sadness, therefore, opportunely affords us a pause, allowing us to take stock and to revise our goals and plans.[...]
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