Misery is an emotional feature, not a glitch in the system

Tolstoy’s famous opening to Anna Karenina (1878) about happy families being all alike but unhappy ones each being unhappy in their own way applies just as well to feelings. There are simply more ways to feel bad than to feel good — and more words to describe those bad feelings. English is bloated with terms for anger, anxiety, sorrow, shame, jealousy, regret. When it comes to the positive side of the spectrum, the vocabulary thins out fast. Indeed, we lack satisfactory terms for a range of positive emotions, such as the pleasure of waiting for something good to happen or the absence of hunger or pain. Research on autobiographical memory shows that people’s self-reports of emotional reactions to adverse experiences tend to reveal exquisite differentiation between different negative emotions, but the same is not true of recollections of positive experiences.

In some essential respects, our emotions resemble basic physiological feeling states like hunger and thirst that the body uses to protect itself. Each of these states comes equipped with a stick that will punish us if a need isn’t addressed. We feel pangs of hunger when we lack nutrition; the intensifying agony of thirst when we lack hydration; the (curiously unnamed, at least in English) discomfort associated with the need to urinate or defecate; physical pain when we get hurt; and the misery of being too hot or too cold when our body temperature deviates from its set point. These sensations feel bad, and for obvious evolutionary reasons, each feels bad in its own way: Hunger doesn’t feel like pain, and pain in your leg doesn’t feel like pain in your stomach. Each signal points to a different remedy, and we usually know exactly what needs to be done to stop the “beating.”

Most of these systems also offer a carrot — a burst of pleasure when the need is being met. Scientists call this alliesthesia: Food tastes better when we’re hungry, cool water feels better when we’re hot. But the asymmetry is striking. Quite simply, the stick is mightier than the carrot. Discomfort persists — hunger gnaws, thirst intensifies, pain sharpens — until the problem is solved. Pleasure, by contrast, tends to be brief. Once we’ve eaten or cooled off, we don’t continue to feel good about it. The system shuts off, and the carrot, once delivered, is quickly forgotten.

The carrot also requires forward thinking — we have to recognize that food will taste good if we eat it and then act on that recognition. The stick, by nature of its immediacy, does not require forward thinking. Our response to pain and suffering is usually automatic (like removing your hand from a hot frying pan). Perhaps this explains why, when people are asked to match adjectives to their respective categories, they are much quicker — by more than a third of a second — to pair pain-related words with the concept of pain than they are to match pleasure-related words with pleasure.

At first glance, emotions like anger, sadness, pride, or disgust might seem different from biological drives like hunger or thirst. But the difference is mostly one of complexity, not kind. Like those bodily systems, emotions feel good or bad, and they push us toward action. But, while hunger and thirst come with both a carrot and a stick, most emotions only come with a stick. They are not there to reward us. They’re there to motivate us — often through discomfort — to change our behavior in ways that, over evolutionary time, helped our ancestors survive.

Most emotion researchers agree that there’s a small set of “basic” or “core” emotions shared across cultures, though they differ on which emotions make the list. The most common version includes six: sadness, anger, disgust, fear, surprise, and happiness. Of these, four are unambiguously negative. One, happiness, is clearly positive. And surprise can go either way, depending on what’s popping out of the box. Some researchers have proposed adding shame — tellingly, another negative.

Not only are there more negative emotions than positive ones, but the negative ones tend to overpower the positive. Psychologists Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman captured this dynamic with a vivid metaphor: Drop a cockroach into a vat of wine, and the whole thing is ruined; pour fine wine onto a cockroach, and it does nothing to improve the roach. This “roach effect” applies broadly. If you’re in acute pain, no amount of beauty, humor, or pleasure will cancel it out. It’s hard to imagine someone enjoying a sunset or a symphony while passing a kidney stone. While no amount of good can neutralize the truly bad, even a trace of bad can ruin something good. How much pleasure remains in a fine meal after a loved one makes a thoughtless comment (or, just as likely, bristles after you said the wrong thing)?

This “negativity bias,” as it is commonly called, arises early in childhood, has been documented in all cultures in which it has been explored, and has also been observed in non-human primates and even birds. As with so much else, Adam Smith intuited the negativity bias long before the term was coined. “Pain,” he wrote, “is, in almost all cases, a more pungent sensation than the opposite and corresponding pleasure. The one almost always depresses us more below the ordinary, or what may be called the natural state of our happiness, than the other ever raises us above it.”

What good are positive emotions?

Despite the media’s and popular literature’s huge focus on happiness, psychologists have been largely flummoxed when it comes to explaining what function positive emotions serve, and there is far less consensus on this issue than on the function of negative emotions. In a paper about positive emotions, the emotion researcher Charles Carver asks, “What are positive feelings? Do they have a purpose? How do they arise?”

It is unlikely that any emotion expert, including Carver, would pose an analogous question about whether negative emotions have a purpose. Likewise, one of the most highly cited articles on positive emotions, by Barbara Fredrickson, states that “psychology’s knowledge base regarding positive emotions is so thin that satisfying answers to the question ‘What good are positive emotions?’ have yet to be articulated.” Fredrickson goes on to describe how different negative emotions, but not different positive ones, are associated with identifiably different facial expressions, whereas all positive emotions simply result in a generic smile.

Our emotions were built to keep us alive and reproducing, not to keep us happy. Misery is not a glitch in the system but a feature of it, and perhaps the defining one.

Likewise, different negative emotions have at least crudely different measurable bodily effects (such as changes in heart rate and skin temperature), whereas different positive emotions have so far not been found to produce distinguishable bodily responses. Research also shows that negative emotions (just like pain and other unpleasant physiological feeling states) are much more likely than positive ones to lead the person experiencing them to try to make sense of them — to figure out what is causing the negative emotion and what types of steps could be taken to alleviate it.

All of this points to a simple and sobering conclusion: Our emotions were built to keep us alive and reproducing, not to keep us happy. Misery is not a glitch in the system but a feature of it, and perhaps the defining one. From an evolutionary standpoint, positive emotions may serve mostly as contrasts — reprieves from the real work of avoiding pain, correcting mistakes, and navigating threats.

Think of it as a version of the “good cop, bad cop” routine: The bad cop — our negative emotions — does all the work, pushing, interrogating, keeping us on edge. The good cop — our positive feelings — earns goodwill simply by offering a break from the brutality. In this sense, as Schopenhauer once observed, positive emotions aren’t really positive at all. “What is commonly called happiness,” he wrote, “is really and essentially always negative” — a momentary absence of suffering, a brief pause between the relief of one painful desire and the onset of the next.

This article is featured on Big Think.