If we avoid sadness in life, why do we seek it in art?

by Tara Venkatesan, cognitive scientist and operatic soprano

A woman passionately singing, eyes closed, with red nails and lipstick, hands raised near her face, on a dark background.

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Philosophers and psychologists have puzzled over the allure of tragic art. New findings show how sadness can be a comfort

https://psyche.co/ideas/if-we-avoid-sadness-in-life-why-do-we-seek-it-in-art

As an opera singer, I’ve noticed that some of my favourite soprano arias are incredibly sad: about dying, losing the love of your life to someone else, or even lamenting that you’ve been cursed by an evil sorceress. When it comes to art, I’m far from the only one drawn to dark themes. From Taylor Swift’s breakup anthems to Picasso’s Blue Period paintings to poignant movies like The Notebook (2004), many people seek out art that expresses profound feelings of sadness. Maybe you do too?

It’s a phenomenon that has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers alike. Given that we usually dread sadness and strive to avoid it because it feels so bad – from painful conversations to the grief of loss – why do we actively seek it in art? Why do we pick films that we know will leave us sobbing in the movie theatre, or stream Sad Girl playlists carefully curated to provoke sorrow and melancholy? Why, when we look at paintings depicting human suffering, do we find them beautiful?

As well as being a singer, I’m also a cognitive scientist. Together with my research colleagues at Yale University, I recently embarked on a series of studies to help unravel this mystery. We think we’re getting closer to understanding how and why art transforms an otherwise aversive emotion into something that can be a comfort. But we started by looking at some of the existing theories for the allure of sad art.

Scholars have previously argued that it is the ‘formal features’ of art, such as meter, melody and contour, that can make expressions of sadness in books, songs or paintings more enjoyable than a real-life sad conversation with a friend. To an extent, this chimes with my own experience – a lot of what I find so enjoyable about listening to and singing those sad arias I mentioned is the other stuff surrounding the sadness: the beautiful melodies, the sweeping orchestrations and the poetic language. Earlier research backs this up. The literary scholar and philosopher Winfried Menninghaus and the psychologist Valentin Wagner, together with their colleagues, showed that increasing the presence of formal features, such as alliteration and rhyme, in a poem, increased people’s liking for the work, regardless of how sad it was.

So, the formal features of art are likely part of the story, but there’s much more to it. Wagner, Menninghaus and others have also proposed that merely thinking that we’re engaging with art (as opposed to something that’s not art) can change our experience – perhaps because it allows us to view it through an aesthetic, rather than real-life, lens.

Simply believing that something sad is a work of art can influence how much you like it

In one study to test this, Wagner and co showed that, when people were told they were looking at a picture from a recent exhibition at a famous art museum, as compared with looking at the same picture from a website on cleanliness and hygiene, they tended to rate the picture much more positively – even when it was a scene that many people would usually find disgusting, such as a pile of worms or intestines.

Relatedly, a different team of researchers led by the cognitive neuroscientist Sarita Silveira found greater activation of emotional processing areas in participants’ brains when they viewed a painting that they believed was from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City as compared with when they viewed the same painting but thought it was from an adult education centre.

My colleagues and I wondered if these ‘framing effects’ might be especially relevant to the way people experience sad art. What if simply calling something that’s sad a ‘work of art’ changes how we receive it? To test this, we showed participants identical sad texts but with a crucial difference in framing. Some were told they were reading a work of art, such as a short story, song lyric, theatre monologue or movie script. For others, the same text was framed as not-art, such as a blog post, a Tweet, a diary entry or a dialogue.

For example, we showed people the following excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and told some of them that they were reading a monologue from a play, while we told others that they were reading an entry from someone’s personal diary:

Tonight I am ugly. I have lost all faith in my ability to attract males. And in the female animal that is a rather pathetic malady. My social contact is at the lowest ebb. Bill, my one link with Saturday night life, is gone, and I have no one left. No one at all. I don’t care about anyone, and the feeling is quite obviously mutual. What is it that makes one attract others? Last year I had several boys who wanted me for various reasons. I was sure of my looks, sure of my magnetism, and my ego was satiated. Now, after my three blind dates – two of which flopped utterly and completely, the third has also deflated. I wonder how I ever thought I was desirable.

Strikingly, we found that participants liked and enjoyed the exact same sad text more when they were told they were reading a work of art versus not-art. So, beyond any formal features that distinguish art from not-art, simply believing that something sad is a work of art can influence how much you like it.

But what is it about believing that something is ‘art’ that makes it enjoyable, even when it’s sad? The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed that tragic plays provide us with catharsis, a purging of negative emotions, because the play is a work of fiction that creates a safe space where we can explore intense feelings without facing real-world consequences. By this account, we enjoy reading the above monologue because we believe that the descriptions of depression and mental trauma are not based on real sadness. And because fictional sad things are less traumatic than real sad things, we can enjoy the work.

However, the results from another of our studies throws a wrench into this hypothesis. Once again we showed people the same text, and again, for some of them, we labelled it in a way that implied it was ‘art’ (such as a lyric, a story or a script) and for others we labelled it in a way that implied it was ‘not-art’ (such as a blog post or a diary entry). Then we asked all of them how real they thought the emotions and events described in the text were. While people generally assumed that pieces labelled ‘art’ were more likely to be fictional, their liking for these sad texts didn’t stem from this perception of fictionality. In fact, in direct contradiction of Aristotle’s theory, we found something startling: the more participants believed the sad emotions and events described in a text were real, the more they liked it.

As a musician, this finding makes intuitive sense to me. If I suddenly learned that Nick Cave’s songs about addiction were just made up and not actually based on his own struggles with drug use, I think I would find that extremely off-putting. It would feel disingenuous and inauthentic. Our findings seem to reflect this idea that we like sad art more to the extent that we think the sad things actually happened to the artist.

Seeking out sad art when you’re feeling low can actually be a positive step to take. It can give voice to your own feelings

All this led us to an alternative idea that might help explain the allure of sad art as proposed by philosophers such as Anna Christina Ribeiro – appropriation. According to Ribeiro, when we engage with a work of art, we experience it as an expression of our own emotions rather than an expression of someone else’s emotions.

As a singer, this appropriation hypothesis sounds right. Imagine you’re at a Taylor Swift concert and she sings: ‘I know it’s long gone and that magic’s not here no more. And I might be OK, but I’m not fine at all.’ In singing these lyrics, Swift wants to communicate her feelings but she’s also doing something else. She’s inviting you to think about your own emotions and experiences. You would not, however, be expected to ask Swift how she’s doing and comfort her after the show – that would be weird! Similarly, when I write a song about a heartbreak or loss, I write based on my own experiences, but I don’t expect the audience to be thinking about me and my life when I sing for them. I assume they’re thinking about their own experiences and feelings.

The appropriation hypothesis suggests that simply calling something a work of art could give us licence to experience the emotions expressed as though they are our own feelings, and that could explain our liking for sad art.

To test this, we again presented people with the same texts, and again sometimes labelled them as ‘art’ and sometimes as ‘not-art’. For example, people read the from the song ‘My Immortal’ (2003) by Evanescence, and were told they were either reading song lyrics or a Tweet:

I’m so tired of being here …
I wish that you would just leave
’Cause your presence still lingers here
And it won’t leave me alone.
These wounds won’t seem to heal. This pain is just too real.
There’s just too much that time cannot erase.

But, this time, we asked our participants how much they experienced the text as an expression of their own thoughts and feelings. We found that people were indeed more likely to appropriate the sad text when it was presented as art compared with when it was presented as non-art. And, crucially, the more they appropriated the text, the more they liked it.

Despair can help us mourn lost futures and chart new paths

JULIETTE VAZARD

A spinning vinyl record with an orange label and a turntable needle in motion on the black grooved surface.

You can use music to escape your negative thought loops

STEFAN KOELSCH

A person wearing a futuristic robotic suit walking through a lush green forest.

Finding solace in Murderbot

CHRISTIAN JARRETT

Our experiments cannot explain why appropriating art leads to greater liking, but we think it is likely that appropriating the sadness makes people feel less alone, and this, in turn, leads them to ‘enjoy’ the sad art, even though we usually try to avoid sad things. This jibes with previous research, led by the philosopher Mario Attie-Picker, in which our participants told us they enjoy sad music because it makes them feel more connected to others. It seems highly plausible that appropriating sad art in all its forms – be that music, stories or paintings – makes us feel as if someone else understands our sadness, and it is this sense of connection that explains the feelings of liking and enjoyment.

If this account is correct, it could also help to explain another paradox – the way that so many of us are drawn to sad art specifically when we’re feeling down – and why that may not necessarily be a bad thing. Although excessive wallowing in sad art can be a mark of depression, especially in individuals prone to rumination, our findings suggest that seeking out sad art when you’re feeling low might actually be a positive step to take. It can give voice to your own feelings – perhaps feelings that you’ve had trouble expressing yourself. The next time you’re feeling low, then, playing a tear-jerker, watching a sad movie or reading a lament might be just what you need to feel seen, understood and comforted.SaveShare

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SADNESS AND SORROW MUSIC STORIES AND LITERATURE

Published 9 April 2026

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