Often, sadness is associated with unhappy feelings. Problems with friends, death of friends and relatives, sickness, temporary and permanent separations, problems with relatives, failure in achievement situations, bad news, solitude, and end of pleasurable experience may be reasons of becoming sad.
In humans, sadness is characterized by specific behaviors (social withdrawal, lower reward seeking, slow gait), a typical facial expression (drooping eyelids, downcast eyes, lowered lip corners, slanting inner eyebrows), physiological changes (heart rate, skin conductance) as well as cognitive/subjective processes. Some studies have reported that when the people feel sadness, his heart rate (HR) accelerates or the skin conductance level (SCL) increases, while others have reported that HR decreases or the SCL drops.
Indeed, it possesses certain clinical characteristics (e.g., feelings of intense sadness, rumination about the loss, insomnia, poor appetite, and weight loss) which make it qualify for a diagnosis of major depression.
Sadness may also sometimes be described as a psychological pain accompanied by additional feelings of loneliness, distress, depression, anxiety, grief and anguish.
Sadness does have an influence on judgments. Regarding the behavioral consequences, some inconsistencies exist: sadness leads to withdrawal from other people and activities, but sadness also facilitates seeking pleasure, which influences, among others, consumer behavior.
Concept of sadness
