The agony and the ecstasy

For decades, researchers have wondered: Is there really such a thing as a ‘mixed emotion’, or is it just the brain toggling back and forth between two different states? Well, not only do mixed emotions exist (scans have now proven this), they have a surprising benefit: they can apparently make us better thinkers

- Anesha George

How does one explain the exhilaration and fear of moving to a new city? The ache of sadness and gratitude at the end of a long-awaited trip? The grief and relief just after a breakup?

Can people truly feel both positive and negative emotions at the same time, or do we just rapidly flip back and forth between different ones?

For over 150 years, researchers have been trying to answer this question, not just because it is intriguing, but because it has implications for how we deal with risk, navigate new experiences, and navigate our world. Before we unpack some of this, a brief look back.

Since Charles Darwin's publication of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, emotions have been studied as mental states that cause distinct expressions: the smile, shrug, sneer. More recently, researchers have named and studied phenomena such as dimorphous expression, where a person experiences a strong emotion and expresses it as cues linked to a very different feeling (think, tears of joy).

Dimorphous expressions likely hark back to a time before language. Struggling to convey, “Yes, I'm happy, but how do I express how happy this has made me,” for instance, tears spring to the eyes and do the job.

Mixed emotions have been harder to study, requiring brain scans just to confirm their existence. It was only last year that psychologists and neuroscientists at the University of Southern California (USC) Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences proved, for instance, that the brain does in fact display distinct neural signatures when experiencing mixed emotions.