Sadness is a mood that displays feeling of disadvantage and loss. Deep immersion in this feeling may lead eventually to depression, which is a pathological state, requiring in most cases intervention by a qualified professional. During the sadness the person becomes quiet, less energetic and withdraws into oneself. He has neither the urge to go out and to activate nor to contact with others. Visually sighs of the sadness are head and look downcast, sloping body, stuck out lips and a slow and weak physical activity. Sadness considered as an opposite feeling to happiness. Synonyms to this feeling are sorrow, grief, unhappiness, misery, melancholy and gloom. According to the philosopher Baruch Spinoza there are three basic feelings: passion, happiness and sadness. Spinoza defined sadness as “transfer of a person from a large perfection to a smaller one”.
According to biblical verse sadness is sorrow or grief derives from a bad action by another person. Sadness diluted with anger.
Sadness and the accuracy of the evaluation
[Forgas, 1992, 1994] has found that there is an influence of mood on accuracy of the evaluation of people. This influence may originate from miss collecting information or from faulty information processing. The main argument regarding miss collecting information is that bias results derive from matching to the current mood. For instance: Forgas &Bower, 1987 have found that happy people were inclined to evaluate others in a positive way – they matched their positive evaluation to their positive mood. Hence, bias may occur when a person relates to his current mood as a source of information that in turn influences his evaluation.
As previously mentioned, accuracy of evaluation may effected by directly influencing information processing. It was found that happy people tend to process information in a short period of time and more accurately compared to sad people who process information logically, over extent period of time and less accurately ([Ambady & Gray, 2002]). Several explanations have been provided:
•Functional ([Forgas, 1998]) – Mood indicates a social situation that in turn enables specific behavior. Therefore, happiness indicates a positive social situation in which the behavior would be more freed. In contrast, sadness indicates a dangerous social situation that requires more intention and for that reason requires greater and more precise information processing.
•Motivational (Isen, 1984) – People in positive mood avoid deep information processing that may doubt the positive situation they’re in. In contrast, people in sad mood make a lot of effort in order to change the negative situation they’re in.
•The ability to process information is influenced by mood ([Isen, 1987]) – Happy people, as opposed to sad people have less cognitional resources required for deep and precise information processing. A study which tried to strengthen this argument showed that resource blocking using distractions, prevented from deep and precise information processing and raised the effectiveness among people in sad mood ([Ambady & Gray,2002]) .
Sadness and status position
Studies revealed that when people recognize the expressed emotion, they tend to attribute additional characteristics to the person expressing that emotion (Hallo effect). A happy person surrounds himself with affection characteristics, a sad person is perceived as weak and lacking ability but also as warm and nice ( Keltmher,et al.,1998 ) and an angry person is perceived as powerful, dominant but also as less warm and less social. (Kelthmer, 1997).
[Tiedens, 2001] study was trying to explore whether people provide power to people they like or to people they perceive as powerful. The study examined handing over social position in political, business and job interview situations. Its findings have revealed that people had preferred to give status position and power to an angry (anger) leader rather than to a sad one. This finding indicated that people tend to provide power to those perceived by them as powerful instead of to those whom they like. In the business situation a positive statistical correlation has been found between sadness and social contribution extent, but those who expressed anger have been perceived as people that can be learnt from and therefore deserve status and promotion. In the job interview situation it has been found that the angry person is perceived as more suitable for promotion and high salary compared to the sad one.
