Deconstructing “Negative Emotions”: A Paradigm Shift in Understanding Sadness

Cultural and educational contexts, particularly within positive psychology, have traditionally conceptualized happiness in terms of well-being, emphasizing the pursuit of positive affect through the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of negative affect. This orientation risks pathologizing normative emotions such as sadness, implicitly discouraging their expression. A paradigm shift may therefore be warranted in which psychological health is defined not by the predominance of positive emotions, but by emotional flexibility, the capacity to experience, regulate, and integrate a full range of emotions in accordance with situational demands.Within this framework, sadness is conceptualized along two distinct dimensions: state sadness, a context-dependent and transient response that mobilizes adaptive processes supporting reflection, attachment-related signaling, and socio-emotional learning; dispositional sadness, a stable temperamental propensity characterized by pervasive dejection, diminished affective recovery, and reduced contextual sensitivity. While state sadness is functionally embedded within the attachment system and facilitates proximity-seeking and relational repair following loss or separation, dispositional sadness represents an inflexible emotional style associated with increased vulnerability to internalizing psychopathology. Recognizing sadness as a potentially adaptive and developmentally salient emotion, rather than as a priori evidence of dysfunction, has important implications for clinical practice and caregiving contexts, helping to mitigate the premature medicalization of emotional suffering.