In this case, one might also infer some information about that person's personality. Negative emotion tends to wear away at a person over time, especially when it's intense, unremitting, and therefore often self-reinforcing and somewhat irrational. If a person tends to experience a lot of negative emotion over a wide range of circumstances, it might not be so unusual to be confused about why it won't go away.

A person lacks emotional insight or self-awareness, and may be somewhat unusual in this regard.A person feels one of these emotions in a given moment and doesn't know why maybe the emotion is unusual, but the person isn't necessarily, especially if it's an isolated event or an odd situation.Given the extremely limited information in this question (full disclosure: I flagged it as too broad.you'll see why by the time I'm done with this gargantuan answer), I've already offered two very general possibilities: Some people barely understand any of their emotions, let alone their sources, though I think most of us probably understand most of our emotions. Self-awareness and emotional insight are separate from the capacity for emotion. One may feel sadness, or self-loathing, or any emotion in a given moment without knowing why immediately, if ever. However, positive and negative affect are not polar opposites as they occur over time the relationship between frequencies of positive and negative emotions is only weakly to moderately negative, as befits the two-factor structure of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule ( PANAS Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), a common measure of retrospective affective experience over brief periods of time. I favor the circumplex model for describing the structure of subjective emotional experiences in any given moment: The only difference between feeling sad and knowing why, and feeling sad and not knowing why, is successful attribution - coming up with a plausible guess.Įmotional experience may be modeled in a variety of ways. So the reality is that people who feel sad and don't know why, are. If you've ever had a girlfriend on her period blame her feelings on the way you treat her, then you know what I mean. Sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they get it wrong. They then (unconsciously) 'guess' why through inference. Put another way, people in general sense physiological states (such as sadness) without knowing why. Successful attribution typically requires a plausible cause-and-effect relationship - that is, the most likely explanation is probably the correct one. So you search for possible reasons: Maybe a conversation you had recently didn't go well, maybe your bank account is low on funds, maybe you notice that you haven't spent time with friends lately. This may cause a negative effect on your mood - sadness. Imagine having a low level of serotonin in your brain. Similar research supports the idea that physiological inputs (eg, the effects of hormones in our system) are combined with a process of inference to produce emotion. Presumably the men on the suspension bridge were more aroused than the ones on the solid bridge, and misattributed their arousal to the attractiveness of the interviewer. Men surveyed on the suspension bridge were more likely to include sexual content in their answers, and more likely to call the interviewer later. Some of the men were on a 'fear-arousing' suspension bridge, while other men were on a 'non-fear-arousing' solid bridge. This is exemplified by a classic experiment in which men were surveyed by an attractive female interviewer while on a bridge. Modern theories of emotion suggest that like many aspects of self-knowledge, emotion is 'inferred' rather than 'introspected'.

Feeling sad for no reason