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Analysis Of Beyond Happiness: The Upside Of Feeling Down By Hutson

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No one question the positive effect of feeling good, but are there any benefits from unpleasant emotions? It seems that people has been chasing for good mood in the last 2 decades, but there are several people trying to find positive influences for feeling bad underneath. In the Psychology Today article “Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down” (2015), Hutson focuses his attention on the how human beings benefit themselves from negative emotions. Hutson has some strong point that there are many positive effects from negative emotions, which are expressing anger is good in negotiation, guilt can motivate individuals to fix the mistake, and envy is one of the motivation to drive people to success.
In” Beyond Happiness: The Upside of Feeling …show more content…

At the first place, he talks about how fear and anxiety affect human’s life. Fear is people’s protection and a useful tool to face the threat and prepare to flee from the danger situation. Hutson points out that the response of fear is not controlled by human’s will, but it relates to the evolution. He also claims that people tend to be uncritical risk-takers without fear anything, especially unnecessary risk could hurt people themselves. When you feel the fear but you don’t know the reason, you turn fear into anxiety. The benefits from anxiety, based on Hutson’s information, is that it will stimulate people attention and self-discipline. Anxiety can also provide individuals a corrective purpose to let them being true to themselves. Then Hutson points out that regret happens when you want to undo and change your mind and it will let people think carefully before they act. Humans’ brain will highlight the mistake people made before, because it is a good chance to increase their own abilities. Author also believed that regret is a kind of motivation to encourage us to fix what we made wrong before. Regret arise when people realized if they took a different action they will get a different result, while disappointment is the result is worse than your expectation. The benefits of regret are that it will bring people together to share their stories and make each other humbler or more vulnerable. Hutson thinks …show more content…

First, anger comes from being undervalued. Expressing anger can show others that angry people believe that they are underestimate. In other words, this could let the rest of individuals think twice about angry people’s ability, which means showing anger can change others opinions about undervaluing people. Having a second chance to display the ability that are ignored at first will help people in the negotiation. Second, expressing anger can let others fear you in negotiation. Recent research in negotiations (Van Kleef et al., 2003) has shown that expressing one’s anger can make rivals to feel fear and make larger concessions. What more, showing anger can also prevent oneself from being duped. Third, those who expressing anger are seen as higher in social status, because people are afraid of those who are powerful or who do well in the field where normal individuals are not good at. People can demonstrate a higher value by showing angry in the appropriate occasion. That makes sense because it is rare to see the normal people to show their anger to authority or powerful person compared with feeling fear of them. In sum, expressing anger can let people revalued, make concessions for those rivals who feel the fear, and display a higher social status. There is no doubt that showing one’s anger can benefit people in the

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