Misery Loves Company

It doesn’t matter much whether you are a student delving into the wonders of Psychology, a writer for this site, or just an enthusiast investigating the recesses of the field, you would notice. There’s always a connection for everything. I find it particularly interesting that the topics I come across are somewhat interconnected in more ways than one. But hey, it’s Psychology, I constantly need to remind myself. This is about behaviour, there’s always a connection to everything. And I can’t help but smile at that fact.

We have already tackled on The Chameleon Effect and how emotions are transferred from one person to another. But have you ever wondered if there is some connection to the idiom “Misery Loves Company” to these theories? Well, there is, in fact.

The first longitudinal comparison in about the transference of emotions was conducted by Chris Segrin, a professor of Psychololgy at the Univerisity of, Arizona at Tucson. He surveyed 153 daring couples and 170 pairs of roommates for three months.

He concluded that women’s emotional states – positive or negative – were unrelated to changes in their boyfriends’ moods and vice versa. Moreover, couples that have been dating longer were no more likely to mirror each other’s emotional states than were newly minted partners. “I was surprised by how similar the partners’ moods remained over time. I thought there’d be much more fluctuation.” Says Segrin.

There was evidence of short-loved emotional contagion: Severely depressed subjects were more likely to have a roommate whose mood declined over a six-week period than were less depressed subjects. But subjects cheered up noticeably when they spent time away from their miserable roommates.

Though this study was focused on depressive mood, Segrin’s results were the same for people with sunny dispositions. “Couples were as matched on positive affect as on negative affect. Happy people seek out happy people, and those who are down and out seek the same.”

Maybe this is so because of humans having the natural tendency to search for people that feel the same way they do in order to build a certain kind of social connection. But possibly, it can be the other way around. Maybe the reason why misery loves company is because misery seeks company. The people who are feeling the negative emotions are drawn to company to alleviate the feelings they harbor. And it is said that sadness promotes the building of social relationships.

Heather Gray, Keiko Ishii, and Nalini Ambady of Harvard Medical School, Kobe University, and Tufts University respectively, investigated on the social function of sadness. In their first study, they manipulated participants’ moods by showing them a sad video (ex: a scene from a movie depicting the death of a friend or a family member); a happy video (ex: a stand-up comedy routine); or a neutral video (ex: a nature documentary). Participants in a sad mood paid more attention to social cues (ex: the tone of a speaker’s voice) in an auditory perception task.

In a second study they conducted, following a similar mood manipulation, participants were asked to list activities they “would like to do right now”. Research assistants who were unaware of the participants’ moods, then pool the lists of activities and coded them into a series of categories, including whether each activity was social or not. Sad participants listed more social activities compared to those in happy, afraid, or neutral moods.

So it does seem that sadness, as opposed to other emotions, does in fact prompt people to pay more attention to social information and seek to build relationships with other people. We can only conclude right now that each of the reasons for these are arbitrary to each person, and there is no universal reason. What do you guys think? Do you agree with the findings? How could it apply to social situations wherein both happiness and sadness mix? I’d love to hear from you!

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