see also:

• psychiatry and mental health
• antidepressants
• suicide
• Geriatric depression scale
• stress
• happiness
• depression

• sadness is an important negative emotion that serves many purposes to benefit us such as:
  • a trigger for the need for more attentive and detailed thinking style
  • better memory
  • more accurate judgements
  • more perseverance with difficult tasks
  • better communication with more effective persuasive arguments
  • greater attention to social expectations and norms, and less selfish and more fair treatment of others
  • it is often a trigger for creativity
• when it is prolonged and dominates a person it's benefits are outweighed by increasingly restrictive, negative cognition and risk of depression