Question

Sadness is a negative emotion that can advance into a pretty serious clinical domain (i.e., major depression). Explore why it might be adaptive to have an emotion like sadness even though it can sap your energy, reduce your productivity, and a number of other negative effects.

Answer 1

All the emotions that have survived over time of evolution must have some usefulness for humans otherwise they would not have survived.

We know advantages if certain negative emotions such as anger helping to fight , fear pushing for avoiding life threatening events. However , benefit of sadness is not well documented.

But recent researches have come up with benefits of sadness

sadness can help people improve attention to external cues, reduce judgmental bias, increase perseverance and motivation to bring change, and improve memory . Such finding suggests that sadness has some adaptive functions.

However , prolonged sadness must be avoided as it may develop into depression and other disorders.