SYSK TRENDING-The Bright Side of Sadness

Summary

Podcast Summary: Something You Should Know – SYSK TRENDING – The Bright Side of Sadness

Host: Mike Carruthers
Guest: David Huron, Professor of Music and Cognitive Science, Ohio State University; Author of The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion
Air Date: July 28, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, Mike Carruthers sits down with David Huron to explore the surprising and often overlooked benefits of sadness. While society chases happiness, Huron's research reveals that sadness—when experienced in healthy forms—brings a host of cognitive and social advantages. Together, they unpack the different types of sadness, how emotions like grief and melancholy function and why feeling sad is not only natural but, at times, essential for personal growth and deeper human connection.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Sadness? (03:37–05:13)

• David Huron defines "sadness" as mostly a negative emotion but distinguishes three main subtypes:
  • Melancholy: A reflective, resigned state ("glum or blue") characterized by deep thinking and resistance to being cheered up.
  • Grief: Closely linked to weeping and intense emotional pain, typically involving the loss of someone or something significant.
  • Nostalgia: A bittersweet mix, usually pleasant, involving longing for the past.
• Quote: "Most nostalgic experiences are actually a mixture of bittersweetness...it's mostly positively valence. So mostly people enjoy a bout of nostalgia."
  — David Huron (04:04)

2. The Importance & Benefits of Sadness (05:13–10:15)

• Normal sadness is beneficial; pathological sadness (like depression or uncontrolled weeping due to illness) is not.

• Melancholy’s Benefits:

  • Promotes accuracy in self-judgment and detailed thinking.
  • Reduces reliance on stereotypes, increases fairness, skepticism, patience, and openness to alternatives.
  • Enhances memory accuracy and social attentiveness.

• Grief’s Benefits:

  • Functions as a social signal to solicit empathy, compassion, and support from others.
  • Crying or weeping triggers helpful responses from observers.

• Quote: “When we're in a melancholic state, it turns out we are our most accurate in our self-appraisals and in our thinking.”
  — David Huron (07:31)

• Quote: “Grief...is a social response to dealing with stress.”
  — David Huron (09:55)

3. Crying: Social Signal or Private Emotion? (10:15–12:39)

• Crying serves to engage observers and elicit help; its expression is influenced by social context and status.
• Public crying can result in embarrassment or a perceived loss of social status, especially among adults.
• Quote: “There is a cost to weeping and the cost is a loss of social status. So it’s the reason infants and children can cry so much...once you reach puberty...people really make an effort not to cry.”
  — David Huron (11:37)

4. Tears of Joy and Other Emotional Displays (13:51–16:45)

• Tears don’t necessarily represent the specific emotion felt; the display is intended to generate certain reactions from observers.
• Example: Beauty pageant winners crying—evokes public empathy and magnanimity.
• Displays can be automatic, sometimes happening even when alone.
• Quote: “The point of crying is not to express the feeling state that we’re in, but to change the behavior of the observers.”
  — David Huron (14:09)

5. The Value of Negative Emotions Amid Happiness Culture (17:07–19:53)

• All emotions, including negative ones, are biologically adaptive—helping us survive and thrive.
• Loneliness motivates social bonding; pain prevents harm.
• Quote: “Negative emotions like loneliness, pain, and the various forms of sadness all serve a very useful function for people in the right circumstances. Sadness is simply part of good mental health.”
  — David Huron (19:41)

6. Sadness and Music (20:13–22:49)

• Sadness in music can come from lyrics or from acoustic qualities that mimic human expressions of melancholy or grief.
  • Melancholic music: Lower pitch, quieter, mumbled (like Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings)
  • Grief in music: High-pitched, loud, cracking or falsetto voice
• Music judged as "sad" often combines these features.
• Quote: “There are some objective criteria by which we can say people are likely to hear this as sad sounding, whether it’s emulating grief or whether it’s emulating melancholic sounds.”
  — David Huron (21:35)

7. What Really Helps with Prolonged Sadness? (23:16–24:48)

• Social contact is the most effective remedy.
• Crying alone typically worsens mood; crying with others tends to be beneficial ("mutual crying").
• The idea that catharsis (emotional purging) helps is only supported when it involves social connection.
• Quote: “The benefits of weeping really depend on the presence of other people...social contact is key to making responding to these sadness states in a way that's helpful to the person who's experiencing it.”
  — David Huron (24:14)

---

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “Sadness is simply part of good mental health.” — David Huron (19:41)
• “When we’re in a melancholic state, it turns out we are our most accurate in our self-appraisals…” — David Huron (07:31)
• “The benefits of weeping really depend on the presence of other people.” — David Huron (24:14)
• “The point of crying is not to express the feeling state...but to change the behavior of the observers.” — David Huron (14:09)

---

Noteworthy Segments & Timestamps

• Definition and Types of Sadness: 03:37–05:13
• Benefits of Melancholy and Grief: 06:32–10:15
• Crying, Social Status, and Tears of Joy: 10:21–16:45
• Cultural Obsession with Happiness vs. The Function of Negative Emotions: 17:07–19:53
• Sadness in Music: 20:13–22:49
• Coping with Persistent Sadness—Social Contact vs. Crying Alone: 23:16–24:48

---

Concluding Thoughts

David Huron makes a compelling case for reframing sadness, not as a malfunction to fix, but as an essential and adaptive emotion. Through its many forms—be it melancholy's introspection or grief's social outreach—sadness can improve thinking, foster human connection, and nudge us toward solutions and support. Understanding and respecting the "dark side" of our feelings might just be the bright side we need.

For a free PDF of David Huron’s book, see the episode show notes for the download link.

Transcript

[Mike Ruhters]

What if one of the emotions we spend the most time trying to avoid is actually one of the most useful? Sadness doesn't feel good, but it may serve an important purpose, helping us think more carefully, connect more deeply with other people, and even appreciate life's joyful moments a little more. And that's why today's Sysk trending topic is the Bright side of Sadness. So why do we experience sadness in the first place? And what happens when we stop seeing it as something to fix and start seeing it as something to understand? My guest today is David Huron, a cognitive scientist who has spent years exploring the surprising benefits of sadness. He'll explain why sadness isn't just an unfortunate part of being human, it may actually help us thrive. It's a fascinating conversation and you'll hear

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

it right after this Starting or growing your own business can be intimidating and lonely at times. Your to do list may feel endless with new tasks, and lists can easily begin to overrun your life. So finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything as a built in business partner can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Gymshark, Rare Beauty and Heinz to brands just getting started. Shopify has hundreds of ready to use templates that can help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style and you can tackle all the important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. And if people haven't heard about your brand, you you can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you with easy to run email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com realm. Go to shopify.com realm that's Shopify.

[Mike Ruhters]

Generally, I think it's safe to say that people want to be happy and there's plenty of talk in the media about how to achieve happiness. What you don't hear a lot about is sadness. Yet we've all felt sad, even struggled with sadness when it sometimes becomes overwhelming. And maybe, just maybe, sadness is a useful and necessary emotion that we need to understand better. Is sadness the absence of happiness? If you're sad does that mean something's wrong with you? Is it okay to just let your sadness be? Or should you try to get unsad? Are there different kinds of sadness? What's the difference between sadness, grief and melancholy? Or are they just different words for the same thing? Here to discuss all this and reveal what I guess you would call the bright side of sadness is David Huron. He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book the Science of a New Understanding of Emotion. Hi, David. Welcome to something you should know.

[David Huron]

It's my pleasure to be able to join you, Mike.

[Mike Ruhters]

So first, why don't you tell me what sadness is? From how you look at it and you study it, what is. Because everybody's felt it, but what is it that we're feeling?

[David Huron]

Well, it's mostly a negative emotion. There are really three main sadness states, and they serve different purposes. There's melancholy, which is a sort of feeling glum or blue or forlorn. We're kind of resigned, and that's characterized by reflection. We tend to think a lot. We tend to resist efforts to cheer us up. And then there's grief, and that's very much linked to weeping. So feeling sobbing or feeling choked up. And then there's nostalgia. Nostalgia is different from melancholy and grief because melancholy and grief are mostly unpleasant, negatively valenced experiences. But most nostalgic experiences are actually a mixture of bittersweetness, we usually say, and in fact, it's mostly positively valence. So mostly people enjoy a bout of nostalgia.

[Mike Ruhters]

So why, since it's mostly positive, why do you lump it in with grief?

[David Huron]

Because there is a sad element to it. And the sad element is usually related to the loss of something that was valued in the past. So it could be a lost relationship or a place that you really enjoyed an event or an object. It's mostly relationship oriented, but you could also be nostalgic for your grandmother's peach piece or a favorite pair of shoes that you can no longer buy.

[Mike Ruhters]

And so why is it important to understand more about sadness? I mean, as I said, everybody feels it, some more than others. But what is it doing? Is it doing anything for us? Or it's an emotion that comes and it goes.

[David Huron]

Oh, it's very much beneficial. It's part of living the good life, actually, is having sadness in the right circumstances. I would hasten to add, though, that like many forms of emotions, there are pathological forms of sadness. So the pathological form of melancholy is depression, and that has no benefit at all. And there are pathological forms of weeping for example, there's something called pseudobulbar affect, which is uncontrolled weeping. It usually happens from a stroke or from some sort of brain injury at any rate. So first of all, it's important to distinguish the normal forms of sadness, normal forms of melancholy and grief, and the abnormal forms such as PBA or pseudobulbara affect or depression. But we can point to research that directly indicates the benefits of melancholy, the benefits of grief or weeping, and the benefits of nostalgia.

[Mike Ruhters]

And so what are those benefits of grief and weeping and melancholy?

[David Huron]

Let's start off with melancholy. Normally people are tuned to the optimistic side. We tend to think that we're more handsome or beautiful than even our friends would deem us to be. We tend to think that we're going to live longer than other people. Everybody thinks that they're a better driver than the average. Now optimism is generally a good thing. So nothing ventured, nothing gained. It encourages us to do all sorts of things. You might think that when we're sad, what we do is we switch these rose tinted lenses for some sort of blue tinted lenses. We think, oh, I'm no good, I'm a schmuck, I can't do anything right, and so on. But actually when we're in a melancholic state, it turns out that we are our most accurate in our self appraisals and in our thinking. And there's a huge amount of research on this. So compared with a happy or a neutral state, melancholy promotes more detailed, oriented thinking. We rely less on stereotypes, we're less biased in our judgments. Our memories are more accurate, we're less gullible, we're more patient, we're more socially attentive, we're more polite, we have a heightened sense of fairness, for example, we're more skeptical, we're better at judging riskiness. And we also tend to invite options more. So instead of just blasting ahead with a single idea, we're more willing to consider the options and we're more willing to change directions. So there are a lot of cognitive benefits to melancholy?

[Mike Ruhters]

Yeah, I guess so. And so what about grief?

[David Huron]

Grief has very different benefits than melancholy. So melancholy is really all about changing the way we think about the world and how we're going to plan ahead to try to deal with the stress that cause us to feel sad in the first place. Grief is a very different thing. So we can make a distinction generally in emotions between those emotions that are evident to others and those emotions that are completely private. So when we think of emotion displays, we think of anger and, you know, smiling and disgust and so forth, things that you can clearly see. But most emotions that people experience are not visible. A person can feel lonely or jealous or bored or nostalgic, even feel in love, not to mention feelings of hunger. These feelings are opaque. People don't see those things. So when we talk about something like weeping, the whole biological purpose and social purpose is to engage others. So our reaction to someone when we see someone crying is this enormous feeling of empathy, this enormous feelings of compassion and commiseration. And it's the, it's this response of other people around us that ultimately helps us out. So one way of thinking about it that the difference between melancholy and grief is that when we're addressing a stress of some sort, you know, whether the stress is you've been fired from your job or your house is burned down or something like that. And we think, what resources are available to me to help me deal with this stressor? So one is our own thoughts, just thinking clearly about things and trying to strategize. And the other very important resource is the people around us. So if we can solicit their help, that can also help us deal with the stressor in many cases. So melancholy is an internal state, whereas grief or weeping is really intended. It's a social response to dealing with stress.

[Mike Ruhters]

But people cry. People weep not only because they're sad, right?

[David Huron]

People weep or cry in all sorts of circumstances, including, you know, tears of joy and so on, tears of pain, tears of laughter. So it turns out that these responses, the tearful responses, end up having the same effect on observers as tears of sadness, tears of grief. So what they mostly do is they encourage observers to really engage us even if they're not able to help us in the end, even if it's just a hug. These things can be very important to the people who are suffering these stresses.

[Mike Ruhters]

Well, what about these tears of joy that, you know, like when you're watching a movie and there's some wonderful happy ending and it's actually embarrassing sometimes I think when you're crying at a movie, you don't want people to notice, you don't want people to engage you. You feel kind of foolish crying.

[David Huron]

That's very good. There was a lovely study done by one of the major airlines a few years. You know, when people are going for a long distance journey and they're, they're watching a movie or something, there are, it's often the case that in a movie there'd be a tearjerker part. And in this survey they were interested in how their passengers responded to these. And people can be embarrassed when they're, you know, if you're sitting in the middle seat with strangers on either side and you've been brought to tears, it can be very unsettling. What was interesting was that women tended to respond by pretending that there was something caught in their eye and men tended to respond by taking a blanket and putting it over their head. So there is a cost to weeping and the cost is a loss of social status. So it's the reason why infants and children can cry so much because they've already relatively low status. Once you reach puberty, once you engage in a lot of social interaction and status becomes important and people really make an effort not not to cry. But that's simply because of the loss of social status with regard to observers. So there are excellent reasons why you should in many circumstances try to mask the experience of crying.

[Mike Ruhters]

We're talking about sadness in a happy kind of way and my guest is David Huron. He's author of the book the Science of Sadness A New Understanding of Emotion. Right now get up to 15% off select storage solutions put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select shelving and tote storage up to 15% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get more done hey friends.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Olivia from Ollie. Between new routines and the ultimate group project known as parenting, you need science backed solutions that work with your life. That's where Ollie comes in. Start your mornings off right with multis made to support nutrition and immune health. Choose from our lineup of gut supporting probiotics and we've got occasional sleep support to help the whole fam chase their big dreams. Head back to class with the number one Gummy supplement brand stock up on ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

[Mike Ruhters]

So David, do we know why we cry when we're happy? Tears of joy kind of thing? Because it is interesting that the same symptom, crying tears, is the same for when you're really really sad and just the opposite when you're really really happy.

[David Huron]

So the point of crying is not to express the feeling state that we're in, but to change the behavior of the Observers. So when you think about it, here's a way to think about emotions and their displays. If we're playing poker and I'm dealt a really nice hand, it would be foolish of me to start smiling and being gleeful in any way because that would just tip everybody's hand as to what, you know, what cards I'm holding. To the extent that emotions predict future behavior, we have a kind of radar that we're constantly trying to infer what state a person is in because it helps us predict what their, what their behavior is going to be. But this is to the detriment of the person who's making the display in many cases. And that's the reason why the vast majority of emotions don't have a display, is we shouldn't, we shouldn't be communicating to everybody what it is that we're feeling, because all we're doing is telling them, giving them information about how our future behavior might be. There's only one circumstance in which we want them to know what our future behavior might be, and that is if they respond to that in a way that's beneficial to us. So let's take an example of tears of pleasure, tears of joy. The classic example here would be the weeping beauty pageant winner. You would have thought that the ones who should be weeping are all the women on the stage who didn't win. So why is it that a beauty pageant winner is crying in particular? Why don't they behave in a way like, say, a boxing champion? You could imagine a situation where beauty pageant winner thrusts her arms into the air and says, I am the greatest. And she turns to the other contestants and says, tough luck, suckers. Well, this would be wholly out of keeping with what it is that we expect of a beauty pageant winner. We want them to be magnanimous. We want them to be humane and reach out to other people. And so the response of the audience to the crying is exactly the same response that we have when they're crying of grief. That is, we feel very positively disposed and want to be helpful to the person who has tears in their eyes, whether they're tears of joy or whether they're tears of grief.

[Mike Ruhters]

But I'll admit to watching a movie all by myself and getting a little teary eyed at the end. And there is no observer. I'm not displaying anything to anybody else.

[David Huron]

That points to another thing that's important about many of these displays and that is the automaticity of the display. That's. So these things are innate. And part of what testifies to that innateness is the fact that we have very difficult time trying to control them. So they will happen in situations where there's nobody around as well.

[Mike Ruhters]

So I'd like you to address, because I'm sure you've noticed we live in a world in a culture that is just obsessed with happiness. There are 4,000 podcasts about happiness, some best selling books about happiness, that we all just need to cheer up and be happy. And you've taken like the other road and talked about the benefits of sadness. So what do you make of all that?

[David Huron]

All of the emotions that we have exist because they're part of what makes us socially and biologically adapted. So the negative emotions have a bad rap, but they're very important. So let me give you an example. Loneliness. So the feeling of loneliness is uncomfortable. It's not nice. But what the feeling of loneliness does is it encourages us to make social contact. In the long run, the feeling of loneliness is going to motivate us to make that kind of social contact and social connections and bonding with others that's going to benefit us. Or another example would be the feeling of pain. So nobody wants to feel pain, but pain is a very useful teacher and very useful in telling us, don't do that. Avoid tissue damage. And there's a very rare condition in which people are born without pain sensors. And you might think, wow, what a great situation. Imagine you can go through life without suffering any of the slings and arrows of pain. But it turns out that people who are born without a pain sensation, they're typically dead by their mid-20s or so. And you might think that the reason for that might be they can't feel a swollen appendix, for example, so they die from appendicitis. But actually the main reason why they die is because of circulation problems that arise because they don't feel these little points of irritation with regard to posture. So when we're standing, every few minutes, we lean to the left or lean to the right or move our, our bodies in particular ways, or when we're sitting, we just change our posture every now and then. And those are important. If you don't do that, you end up pinching nerves and pinching blood vessels and you end up with very complicated problems. And that's the main reason why people without pain sensors die. So negative emotions like loneliness, like pain and the various forms of sadness, all serve a very useful function for people in the right circumstances. Sadness is simply part of good mental health.

[Mike Ruhters]

Yeah, well, what you just said about loneliness so rings true because people Talk about the pain of loneliness, that it's a motivator. You don't want to feel that. And the only way to not feel lonely is to not be lonely.

[David Huron]

You got it. That's right. Yeah. Negative emotions have a bad rapid.

[Mike Ruhters]

Something that is often talked about as it relates to sadness is music. And I don't know if music can make you sad or if it just makes the sadness you have worse or what, but what makes sad music sad.

[David Huron]

So we have to make a distinction between sad music that's sad because of the lyrics, and there are lyrics that are very sad, that the musical setting is not especially sad. And then there's instrumental music that we can point to that's. That's quite sad because it emulates the kinds of sounds that happen when a person is sad. And remember, there are two important sadness, melancholy and grief. So in the case of melancholy, when you're in a melancholic state, you tend to speak with a lower pitched voice, more quietly, you tend to mumble. There are a whole bunch of features acoustically that you can then see in music that people deem to be sad, like Samuel Barber's famous Adagio for Strings, which was played at Princess Diana's funeral. Then the opposite of that is the grief component. And the grief component, when you're. When someone is crying, the acoustical features are very different. So then you have things that are high pitched and loud and you hear this cracking voice and so on. And again, you can point to musical passages in which there's cracking voice or breaking voice, falsetto voice. There's a whole bunch of acoustical features that will tend to encourage listeners to hear the music as sad apart from the lyrics. So there are some objective criteria by which we can say people are likely to hear this as sad sounding, whether it's emulating grief or whether it's emulating melancholic sounds. And in many cases the music will. Music that people judge as sad will reveal both of those kinds of acoustical

[Mike Ruhters]

features, but not necessarily make you sad just because you're hearing it.

[David Huron]

Yeah, that's right. In the same way that when we encounter someone who is crying, we don't necessarily feel grief ourselves. After all, the purpose of encountering somebody or being attentive to the weeping is to evoke feelings of compassion or commiseration towards that person. We feel pity for them or we feel their pain.

[Mike Ruhters]

But then you could also hear a song that isn't sad at all, but you know, oh, that was our song and I miss her so much. And every time I hear it, it makes me sad. But it's not a sad song.

[David Huron]

Yeah. Now at that point we're talking about nostalgia. And nostalgia really has to do with linkages to feelings from past experience. And of course it's true that you can feel that kind of sadness from any arbitrary association. It could be the happiest song in the world, but it happened at the time when you were breaking up and was, you know, you have these negative associations. So that's also true.

[Mike Ruhters]

What does the research say about if you're sad and it's lasting longer than you think, or you're sadder than you think you should be, or you want to get out of it, what helps to alleviate sadness?

[David Huron]

Social contact. That's the most important thing. Aristotle coined this term catharsis. It's actually a pretty colorful term. It actually, in the ancient Greek means laxative. And he had this idea that somehow the emotions could be purged like a laxative. And that's an idea that's had legs for 2000 years. Freud adopted it as an idea of. The idea of purging emotions has become a key concept in psychoanalysis and there's lots of research about that. There are some good things to say about crying. So just the crying itself, mutual crying in particular, you're never so socially connected with someone else as when you're both engaged at the same time and crying. But crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. That's what the research shows. And there's no long term benefits from that. So the benefits of weeping really depend on the presence of other people, people who are moved to help, even if that's nothing more than just a consoling hug. But it's really the social contact that is key to making responding to these sadness states in a way that's helpful to the person who's experiencing it.

[Mike Ruhters]

That's really interesting. So a good cry isn't really any good unless somebody's with you.

[David Huron]

That's what the research shows. Exactly. The research shows that crying by yourself just makes people feel worse. It's the presence of someone else. And when you look at the reports, when people say, oh, it was so helpful for me to cry, when you look at those things, you find out that there's very likely someone else that was there.

[Mike Ruhters]

Well, this has been a unique look at an emotion that I think many of us think is one to get rid of. You know, if you're feeling sad, you want to do what you can to get through it and get over it. But there's a lot to it and I appreciate you coming on to explain it. I've been speaking with David Huron. He is a professor at Ohio State University and author of the book the Science of Sadness, A New Understanding of Emotion. Now you could go to Amazon and pay $50 for a copy of his book, or you can have it for free. David is giving away PDF copies of his book to our listeners for free and all you have to do is go to the show Notes and there is a link in the description and you click on that link and it'll take you to the page where you can get your free copy. Thanks for coming on and explaining all this, David. I appreciate you being here.

[David Huron]

It was my pleasure to be able to join you.

[Mike Ruhters]

I'm micahruthers. Thank you for listening to this sysk trending episode on something you should know.