Enjoyment of negative emotions

What is it about?

The enjoyment of artworks that also elicit markedly negative emotions––such as tragedies, horror movies, disgust comedies––has been the object of theorizing ever since Aristotle. Our model for explaining this puzzling phenomenon is based on a very straightforward idea: Ever since classical poetics, artworks are believed to strive for attention, intense emotional involvement, and privileged access to memory. Recent psychological research has shown that negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions in all these regards. We concluded that artworks and negative emotions may actually be natural allies rather than antipodes. Guided by this assumption, we identified two groups of processing mechanisms that conjointly adopt the art-conforming powers of negative emotions for art’s pleasurable purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. This emotion-regulatory distancing sets the stage for an even more important second group of processing components. These allow art recipients to embrace the experiencing of negative emotions in a thoroughly positive manner. The respective components include the hedonic effects of special artistic treatments of musical sound, words/language, color, etc. on emotional perception, efforts of meaning making that redeem negative events in a positive light, and, most importantly, mixed emotions––such as being moved or fascinated––that help to integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. In sum, all these processing components render art reception that includes negative emotions more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, more memorable, less boredom-prone and occasionally even more beautiful than art-reception that exclusively indulges in positive feelings.

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Why is it important?

The phenomenon is known to virtually everyone. Whereas previous explanations had considered it as a (paradoxical) phenomenon limited to special art-genres only, we show that it is based on a set of fairly elementary psychological mechanisms and is of great importance across a broad range of emotional responses to artworks and media products.