The Positive Side Of Negative Valence Emotions

Many sweet desserts have salt in them. Little, but they carry it. It is a point that, as a chef would say, gives another dimension to the dish. It enhances all the flavors in it. If it’s missing, you notice its absence, but you can’t say it’s bad either. Negative valence emotions would play a similar role.

Sadness adds another flavor to joy, anger or anger adds another flavor to reconciliation and, by extension, the art of living. Like salt, they are capable of spoiling the dish if they become predominant: we will all agree that a dessert is not salty, even though it contains salt … and that is, as it also happens in movies, novels or in plays, secondary characters shine when they fit perfectly into the vertices of the plot.

We see the extreme in many comedies, which approach humor by sliding down the slide of the tragic. Verbalizing what many of us would think in a situation and no one says, exploiting the lack of adaptation of the characters and making traits of their character prevail in certain scenes when most of us, in those cases, would opt for adaptation – without almost anyone dared to accuse us of being false for doing so.

So, we go with some of those negative valence emotions that it is good that they play “the role of salt” in our vital set.

Anger

Anger is not resentment. Perhaps this is the first point that we have to clarify. In fact, if anger turns into resentment, we will have gone overboard.

It is about this emotion motivating us to protect ourselves at a certain moment. It is about channeling their energy, but not containing it in an unintelligent way – the kind that turns against us (that would be resentment or, to put it a little more literary, the hope of revenge) -. It is about motivating us to be assertive and defend the right that we think others have violated.

Perhaps one of the most iconic characters at the other end is The Count of Monte Cristo. Not only does he suffer in his years of imprisonment, but he continues to do so afterwards, despite having found himself with an immense fortune.

His way of acting is not illogical, in fact it can give us the feeling that he had no other option – and no one can deny the interest he gives to the novel. Now, could we say that he is emotionally intelligent? Does your sentence really end when you escape? How long does it take to stop being a prisoner of what was done to you one day? Revenge, when served cold, tastes very bitter and is rarely restorative. Meanwhile, resentment is not a better tasting poison.

The sadness

If before we distinguished between anger and resentment or resentment, it is also necessary to distinguish between sadness and melancholy. This last term refers to a state in which the predominant emotion is sadness. The most frequent origins of melancholy are longing or lack of hope.

Sadness, in the form of a pinch of salt, invites us to reflect. The rhythm of our stream of thoughts decreases, it gives us a cognitive margin to make decisions and build a story with which we can live together. A story, true or false, that we can integrate and allow us to move forward. A gap of hope in the future or a reconciliation with the past. In this way, sadness can go away to make room, for example, for joy.

This situation is very characteristic of the grieving processes. Being an emotion, sadness has a short journey as the protagonist. Thus, in many cases the emotion that replaces it and tries to sustain it is guilt. That of feeling happy or happy about something that has happened to us so close to loss. In this case, it is we ourselves who refuse to come out of sadness due to a very characteristic type of dissonance, but it is not emotion. In fact, this one has probably already served its purpose.

Negative valence emotions in our hands

Emotions, poorly managed, can be the gateway to a chronic and maladaptive emotional condition. We have seen it with two simple or basic emotions, but we could also extend it to more complex emotions by definition, such as envy or that associated with pride.

If positive psychology has been very successful, it has not been by inspiring optimism, but by making us see that once an emotion occurs we can make decisions to manage it. We can make adjustments in many dimensions -physiological, behavioral, cognitive- and in many planes -interpersonal, intrapersonal- so that negative valence emotions are a great contribution, like a pinch of salt to desserts, for our well-being.