The Science of Sadness

This week’s review applies an ethological lens to sadness, exploring how emotions such as grief and melancholy are understood and presented.

Posted on January 27, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

The Science of Sadness: A New Understanding of Emotion

Huron, David. MIT, 2024
408p bibl index, 9780262547772 $50.00, 9780262378307

This splendid volume sets forth a comprehensive and persuasive account of anything anyone would want to know about the family of emotions including sadness, grief, melancholy, etc., and the emotional displays that may attend them, especially weeping. The author is a cognitive scientist who has published on the psychology of music (see Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation, CH, Apr’07, 44-4368), and who has seemingly read everything having to do with every aspect of sadness and its displays from a wide variety of perspectives—psychology and cognitive science, as one might expect, but also ethology, philosophy, and literature. He has produced a thoroughly researched, encyclopedic theory of sadness. It is ethology, the biological study of behavior, that gives his theory its overarching form. The book begins with a judicious and deeply knowledgeable discussion of the problem of defining emotion, not an easy task, in which he first differentiates sadness from melancholy. From this not-so-simple derivation he starts to build his grand theory. What follows is an engagingly written master class in sadness. The book ends with an appendix in which the author presents his Signal Theory of Emotion-Associated Displays in 61 correlated propositions. It is likely to be seen as a milestone in the study of emotion.

Summing Up: Essential. All readers.
Reviewer: R. R. Cornelius, emeritus, Vassar College
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Psychology
Choice Issue: Mar 2025

The Science of Sadness

This week’s review applies an ethological lens to sadness, exploring how emotions such as grief and melancholy are understood and presented.