On Origins of Sadness and Happiness

Abstract

A new way of characterization in terms of "fundamental” emotions is proposed. This is explained in the first section thereby characterizing some emotions as fundamentals and others being derivatives of those fundamental feelings. There are some feelings that are shared across all cultures and individuals. These universal emotions consist of fear, hope, anger, etc. among others. In this paper, it has been tried to illustrate that two such feelings, namely, sadness and happiness, are not the fundamental feelings but are actually derived from other fundamental emotions, namely, fear and hope, respectively. This illustration is shown to be supported by findings in neuroscience, statistical studies done by psychologists, Darwinian theory of evolution and the prospect theory in economics. A holistic approach has been attempted to be incorporated as far as possible, to illustrate the point. Some consequences of these analyses are also sketched and a detailed discussion has been done on the feelings of sadness and happiness when taken together in the context of any individual. Though this way of characterization of emotions is much broader, but in this paper this has been applied only to the feelings of sadness and happiness that are shown to be derived from fundamental feelings of fear and hope respectively.