How The Emotions of Regret and Disappointment Can Be Beneficial for a Person

Famous American writer Carson McCullers once suffered from a disabling spinal disease, and the doctor predicted that her chance of survival was 1/500. Then, Carson often read humorous novels, watched funny movies, and insisted on “smile therapy.” Thus, her condition improved, and she returned to normal after a few years. If Carson were sadness or anxiety, she will not survive. The emotion that feels good can save a person. However, positive emotions are significant for people but not the only ones of people’s emotions in life, and people still have negative emotions. According to“Beyond happiness: The Upside of Feeling Down” by Matthew Huston, negative emotions are important, necessary, and significant for people, and these emotions can make people better. His opinion about negative emotions cannot accept totally. Negative emotions such as fear and anxiety can improve personalities and help people be better. However, Fear and anxiety cannot help people and have bad influences on people. Regret and disappointment can bring newer and more sustainable happiness for people in the future. His opinion about regret and disappointment is acceptable.

About “Negative” emotions, according to the “Beyond happiness: The Upside Of Feeling Down” by Huston, emotion is a part of people’s life. People always do not like negative emotions, but actually, the negative feeling is important and necessary for people. Sometimes the negative feelings can help people to achieve goals and improve personalities. There are several negative emotions. About anger, when people are underrated, people will be angry. Anger sometimes makes people lose control, but anger motivates people to get what they want. Anger does not only benefit the individual but also boosts the process of society such as it can bring fairness and justice to society. About shame, guilt, and embarrassment, when people feel shame, guilt, and embarrassment, they will try to do something to offset failures. And shame, guilt, and embarrassment also can make others to provide help. About envy and jealousy, benign envy can make people better and more successful, but malignant envy is destructive. Jealousy is different from envy. Jealousy rises when a valuable relationship is treated by a third party. About fear and anxiety, fear is a proper response to danger, and fear stimulates people to have solutions that how to be safe. Fear is important for people to avoid risks and make society more ethics and etiquette. If people cannot deal with the threat directly, fear will become anxious, and anxiety has many advantages for us and our life such as making people become high-performance, more careful and self-discipline. About regret and disappointment, the appearance of regret relies on counterfactual thinking, and this thinking can boost learning and planning, and regret events are hard to forget and more memorable for people. Regret is important for people’s improvement and motivates people to fix messes. Anticipated regret makes people more cautious about the future. Regret is different from the appointment. The appointment makes people want to give up instead of starting again, but the appointment can let more people provide help like shame, guilt, and embarrassment. About confusion, frustration, and boredom, confusion can push people to solve problems, and frustration stimulates people more hard working. Boredom makes people find interesting problems. About sadness and grief, sadness and grief motivates change, make people more rational and think deeply. As a result, although negative emotion makes people pain, it is one of the most valuable and abundant experiences people have. Negative emotion is an indispensable part of people’s life.

Huston’s opinion about fear and anxiety is inaccurate. Fear is properly response to danger, but fear cannot help people away from danger. This is because when people feel fear, they cannot calm down, and their thinking ability will diminish and cannot find a solution that how to be safe. According to the article, fear can help people to avoid risks. Alertness can help people to avoid risks instead of fear. Fear makes people flurried and cannot do accurate decisions. If the problem cannot solve directly, fear will become anxious. Anxiety improves the performance of highly intelligent people, whether at work or school, and anxiety makes people energetic and vigilant. This opinion about anxiety is undetermined. Anxiety can cause insomnia, and people do not have the energy to do anything if they cannot sleep well. If people cannot find a way to solve problems, they gradually feel hopeless, so they lose confidence in themselves, lose their sense of hope, lose interest in life, and become depressed. At the same time, people feel terrified. Seriously, they will lose their ability to work, and even they cannot take care of themselves and are bedridden.

Not all negative emotions will bring bad effect to people. Disappointment can help people better understand what is important and which is people care more about. Disappointment differs from regret. Regret is always linked to people’s actions, whereas disappointment can also come up outside of people’s doing. Thus, People can be disappointed that your friend cancels a dinner date but can’t regret it. Researcher Neal Roese of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is a leader in the field of regret research. His studies have shown that regret was rated more favorably than unfavorably, primarily because of its informational value in motivating corrective action. Regret can improve the abilities to approach desire opportunities. This is because when people missed a succeed opportunity or do the wrong action, they will be regret and wish they can succeed next time, and they pay more attention to or focus on the next opportunity, then they will not miss it. Regret events are hard to forget and more memorable. Then when people face similar situations or questions, they recall their regret matters and change a way to solve these situations. People can learn a lesson from regret events.

To conclude, not all negative emotions are significant and important for people. Anger has bad effects on people, but regret and disappointment are necessary and essential for people. Regret and disappointment can make people better. In the future, people should treat emotions correctly. People should control “negative” emotions such as anger. People should pay attention to “negative” emotions like regret and disappointment because people can improve personalities and have a better future.

References

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4. Cappella University. (2019). The psychology of disappointment. Best Psychology Degrees. Retrieved from https://www.bestpsychologydegrees.org/the-psychology-of-disappointment/.
5. Lang, P. J. (1985). The cognitive psychophysiology of emotion: Fear and anxiety.