When I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley I was in a lab that studied emotions. Most emotions we had a pretty easy time understanding what they were about: love was about making a commitment, compassion about helping, etc. But there were a few emotions that always seemed to spark a large amount of discussion and debate in the group, things like nostalgia. What baffled us was that most of the time people will not report feeling negative AND positive emotions at the same time, and yet we all had experienced emotions like nostalgia which clearly make you feel both positive and negative emotions.

A new paper on poignancy (or feeling happy and sad at the same time) by Hal Ersner-Hershfield and his colleagues at Stanford is coming out this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Ersner-Hershfield proposes that poignancy is caused by a meaningful event, place, or circumstance that makes you feel happy, but also involves an ending. Thus, while you are happy, you also have a sense of loss, which elicits feelings of sadness. In one of the studies in the paper they asked graduating Stanford seniors what they were feeling on graduation day. They reminded some graduates that it was the last event they would have at Stanford and didn’t tell this to other graduates. They found that those who were reminded that they would soon be leaving Stanford felt both happy and sad, those who were not reminded of the ending felt mostly happy. It certainly explains why people find themselves crying on happy occasions.

The Stanford Life-Span Development Laboratory is doing some fascinating work on this and many other areas. Check them out at

http://psychology.stanford.edu/%7Elifespan/welcome.htm

You can find the paper at:

Ersner-Hershfield, H., Mikels, J. A., Sullivan, S. J. Carstensen, L. L. (2008). Poignancy: Mixed emotional experience in the face of meaningful endings. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 158-167.