Containing multitudes: Why feeling mixed emotions can actually be healthy

When you see a butterfly touch down on a flower, you might feel a sense of joy because it reminds you of how delicate our world is. At the same time, you might feel a deep sadness well up realizing that butterfly populations are dwindling around the world due to climate change, pesticides and urban development.

Is your brain switching back and forth between the two emotions like a dizzying game of tug-of-war, depending on what you are thinking about or experiencing at the time? Or are we capable of holding two seemingly conflicting emotions at once?

According to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University and longtime emotion researcher, trying to divide the brain’s emotional response into separate feelings of joy and rage is already a flawed premise for posing these questions.

That’s because the brain is constantly receiving signals from the world, drawing on past experiences and cultural influences to produce emotions, Feldman Barrett said. In other words, the formation of our emotions involves a complex association of memory, sensory inputs, and personal differences. Before we have enough memories to draw from to name our experiences, we learn from adults around us that help us label the pleasant and unpleasant sensations that arise.

This helps explain why some cultures have words for mixed emotions that don’t exist in English. For example, “saudade,” in Portuguese and Galician is similar to nostalgia, but doesn’t have the same connotations with memory, such that it can be felt with things that have not been experienced before.

“Every action you take, every experience you have is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present,” Feldman Barrett told Salon in a phone interview. “Without the remembered past, you are experientially blind and basically what you experience is a bunch of noise.”

Just as emotions are made up of a multitude of signals, so too do they involve various systems all across the brain. In one 2019 study, participants had their brains scanned while experiencing a wide range of scary stimuli. While there were the strongest associations in the amygdala, sometimes called the “fear center” of the brain, the study found fear was actually experienced across a “broad, distributed network” including several different areas of the brain. In other research, even people who did not have a working amygdala still experienced fear.

“What this tells you is that there's no one brain signature for fear, and no matter what you measure about emotion, it works like this,” Barrett said.

So what is happening in the brain when we feel both positive and negative emotions at once? The majority of research in the field suggests that there are not two independent feelings occurring at the same time, but rather a single unique feeling produced by multiple sources of information at the moment, Barrett said.

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“It’s not like you’re feeling multiple things at once,” Barrett said. “It’s one unified feeling, but it has complex elements, including features of different sources of emotion and knowledge.”

It could also be that the brain does have separate systems related to processing feelings of aversion and negativity versus pleasure and positivity, but these systems end up blocking each other, in a sense, to produce a single emotion, said Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at Michigan University. 

“They mutually inhibit each other, so that if you turn on the pleasure generating mechanism, it's going to inhibit the disgust and aversion and displeasure mechanism, and vice versa,” Berridge told Salon in a phone interview. “So we experience it often as though it's a point along the line [rather than two separate emotions].”

To better understand this question, Anthony Gianni Vaccaro, who researches cognition and brain science at the NEST Lab of the University of Southern California, conducted a study published last year in which participants watched a bittersweet movie while in an MRI machine and reported when they felt positive, negative and mixed emotions during the film. 

Across the amygdala and the insular cortex, typically associated with emotional processing, he found that brain scans showed consistent patterns for positive and negative emotions, but not mixed emotions. Higher levels of the brain typically associated with cognition, on the other hand, did show a consistent pattern when participants experienced mixed emotions.

“We interpreted that to mean that on these kinds of lower levels of the brain … there is some kind of mutual inhibition between positive and negative [emotions],” Vaccaro told Salon in a phone interview. 

But in higher levels of the brain, that did not seem to be the case for mixed emotions, which could mean the part of the brain responsible for abstract thinking and resolving conflicts could be holding two distinct emotions at once, he said.

“His data really suggests that at some lower levels of the brain we are experiencing more of this oscillatory, univalent emotion that maybe switches between [happy and sad],” explained Sarah Hennessy, who studies cognitive sciences at the University of Arizona. “At the higher levels of the brain ... where we’re representing this abstract information, that is where this mixed feeling is represented as one combined feeling state.”

Fully proving one theory over another is complex because the experience of emotions is so subjective to the individual. But understanding mixed emotions is important because some evidence suggests we might be able to use complex emotions that have both positive and negative qualities to feel better.

Hennessy conducted a study to test mixed emotions in which participants listened to music that was personally nostalgic and music that was similar but didn’t make them feel wistful about the past. She found that nostalgic music activated an area of the brain typically associated with remembering personal experiences and narratives called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, along with the reward networks of the brain.

But whether this was experienced as something positive or negative varied depending on the person, with people who were more prone to feeling nostalgia in their everyday lives interpreting the experience more positively, and people who tended to experience more sadness in their everyday lives interpreting the nostalgia more negatively, she said. 

“In the real world, this is interpreted as this idea that negative feeling elicits nostalgia sometimes because nostalgia is this adaptive mechanism that we have created to help us kind of shift the lens on this negativity to add a little bit more of this positive feeling,” Hennessy told Salon in a phone interview. “So if you’re feeling negative, maybe it helps to think of a time in the past when you were surrounded by people you loved to get this nostalgic feeling to help alleviate this.”

In general, the capacity to hold more granular emotions — like feeling anguished, frustrated or irritable instead of simply “angry” — has been shown to have health benefits. Some studies have shown that people who have a higher rate of this emotional granularity, one form of emotional intelligence, report a greater life satisfaction and well-being, a stronger ability to develop coping mechanisms, and reduced rates of depression and anxiety.

“There is a wealth of research to show that it is really good for you in many ways to have a really flexible emotional life where you can feel emotions that are combinations of different concepts,” Barrett said.

As the brain is constantly learning from sensory inputs we experience, we also have the power to change the way our brain emotionally reacts to things. For example, if you start calling a loved one on your commute home to work, the time spent in traffic that used to infuriate you may instead become a source of joy. Practices like psychotherapy are also designed to rewire the memories in your brain triggering anxiety, fear, sadness or other unpleasant feelings based on past negative experiences.

After all, research suggests developing the capacity to experience mixed emotions is something that we learn in childhood, coinciding with the development of brain regions that handle more complex thought.

“In these higher level brain regions, what we're seeing is massive variability in outputs, and we can get all these new and weird kinds of responses that develop,” Vaccaro said. “I think mixed emotions is one of those things, where we learn that we can be faced with information that suddenly starts to conflict with itself, and we have to figure out a new response to that.”