Companies selling Emotion AI services try to convince potential clients that there are just a handful of basic emotions that are so easy to understand and measure that they can be identified and understood using digital cameras and a bit of algorithmic analysis. Prime among these basic emotions is sadness.
Everyone knows what it means to be sad, right? Sad people, we all learn at an early age, have big frowns on their faces and cry a lot.
Later on in life, of course, we all learn that sadness is a lot more subtle than that. Sad people often have blank, “neutral” expressions. Sad people can smile, or even laugh, in their sadness. Many sad people never shed a tear over the way they feel, but feel just as sad as those with watery eyes.
Still, underneath all that, there is the emotional experience of sadness that we all understand, right? To be sad is to feel unhappy, but sadness is something more than just a lack. It’s something in itself, but what?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines sad as the emotion experienced by a person “affected with or expressive of grief or unhappiness”. People can be sad without grieving anything in particular however, and unhappiness is just the opposite of happiness. So, as long as we’re lumping emotions together, couldn’t we just get rid of the notion of sadness, and just talk about the extent to which a person has happiness?
We know such a reductionist approach is not adequate. We know that sadness isn’t as simple as the lack of happiness. Sadness, though, is undeniably mysterious. Often, a sad person feels rotten about the way things are without knowing exactly why they feel that way, or even what they’re sad about. Things just feel horribly wrong… somehow.
Of course, to be sad is often not a downcast feeling at all. When Donald Trump writes a tweet such as “When the World watches @CNN, it gets a false picture of USA. Sad!” he isn’t frowning or crying. He’s probably feeling closer to angry or gleeful.
Sad is actually a complicated emotional concept with many different nuances. As Trump’s social media taunts demonstrate, sadness can be an accusation as much as a sorrowful feeling.
The word sad comes from the same root as satisfaction. Originally, the emotion of sadness was supposed to communicate something akin to the heavy feeling experienced by someone who was sated… as in having had a great big meal that makes them feel sleepy and slow. Crying and frowning had little to do with it.
Khalil Gibran wrote that “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.” Sad songs or tearjerker movies can bring us a lovely feeling of warmth in sorrow . It doesn’t make sense. How could it make sense?
Contrary to the claims of those software engineers who say they can measure your sadness by the angle of your eyebrow and the tilt of your chin, there’s something in feeling sad that’s by nature inaccessible to full understanding, even by the person having the emotion.
