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Labeling Emotions ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ Can Affect Your Mental Health

Emotions are just biological reactions—until you label them. Labeling emotions can shape your destiny.
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Labeling Emotions ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ Can Affect Your Mental Health
(Thanadon88/Shutterstock)
Robert Backer
By Robert Backer, Ph.D.
12/11/2023
Updated:
1/4/2024
0:00

Imagine a surprise celebration planned by a group of friends for someone’s birthday—let’s call him Alex. As Alex walks into the room, everyone yells, “Surprise!” Although most of us would feel surprised, our emotional responses may differ.

Scenario 1: If Alex interprets the surprise as “good, fun, or enjoyable” or as a joyful expression of love and appreciation from friends who went out of their way to plan a celebration, his emotion of surprise would be coupled with happiness and gratitude. In this scenario, Alex experiences joy, smiles, and expresses heartfelt appreciation. His positive interpretation of the event enhances his overall experience, creating a lasting, positive memory.

Scenario 2: Conversely, Alex may feel startled, uncomfortable, and disoriented by the surprise. This negative interpretation could overshadow the positive intention of the surprise, leading to a less joyful initial reaction.

Although there are often both positive and negative ways to appraise how we feel in different circumstances, positive appraisals of our feelings—such as how Alex reacts in scenario 1—can benefit our health, according to a large peer-reviewed study in the journal Emotion.
“People differ in their habitual tendencies to make particular emotion judgments, and these habitual emotion judgments were associated with individual differences in psychological health,” the authors wrote, adding that “research on emotion judgments has the potential to inform clinical treatments.”

How We Interpret Our Emotions

People are complex. There’s how you feel (essentially, a cascade of hormones and neurotransmitters), and then there are your judgments and reactions toward your feelings. As these two elements interact, your feelings can influence your thoughts, but thoughts also drive your feelings. The result is your emotional experience.
Individuals differ in the emotions they prefer to feel—for instance, some people prefer to preserve calm, placid states, while others revel in exhilaration. (Some readers may find this abundantly clear in romantic relationships when deciding what to do on date night.) Depending on their priorities, some might deem various emotions as positive (e.g., good, appropriate, or useful) or negative (e.g., bad, inappropriate, or harmful).
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For example, certain individuals may view happiness as healthy and desirable, while others may be wary of happiness and experience apprehension about the consequences of feeling happy resulting from letting one’s guard down or losing control. Consistency is also a powerful motive since we tend to interpret our experiences to match our narratives; thus, counterintuitively, some individuals may actually feel more comfortable with negative moods.
To understand how individuals’ emotional appraisals affect their health, researchers for the Emotion study polled more than 1,600 participants, asking them how they usually react to different kinds of emotions. They grouped the gamut of emotional experiences into positive emotions (e.g., joy, excitement, or contentment) and negative ones (e.g., sadness, anxiety, or anger) and looked at how positive or negative reactions to those emotions correlated with their mental health.

‘It’s All Good’

As expected, the results showed that people who interpret positive emotions as good fare better psychologically. Interestingly, judging negative emotions as good, appropriate, or useful was also linked to better health. Contrastingly, those who interpreted positive or negative emotions as bad, inappropriate, or harmful had worse mental health.

This tells us that when you’re feeling sad, although it’s probably not something you want to feel, it may nevertheless be beneficial to consider the utility of such a feeling.

Negative feelings can be like warning lights on a car. They allow you to notice something is awry and motivate you to take action. For instance, anger can be destructive, but it can also signal that we feel something is unfair, galvanize us to ask why, and motivate us to take steps to improve things.

What’s not helpful, of course, is ignoring the warning. Imagine seeing the check engine light appear then pressing on or even accelerating and driving more roughly. That would make no sense, right? And yet people often do the equivalent, such as having a drink or binge eating, when their emotional “warning lights” appear.

Emotion Judgments and Health

What the “glass half full or empty” metaphor should tell us is that multiple perspectives are valid. However, those who view the glass half empty tend to see the downside to positive emotions (e.g., “I feel good now, but I don’t want to get carried away.”) or fail to see the upside of negative ones (e.g., “Now my day is ruined.”) and are more prone to lower levels of well-being.
At a visceral level, it doesn’t feel good to say, “This is bad.” The stress that often accompanies a negative response can be adaptive in the short term, mobilizing the body to face threats or challenges—a process called allostasis. Over time, however, the allostatic load can take a toll on our mental and physical health.

To tame our negative tendencies and enjoy better health, clinical psychology offers several relevant approaches. One is mindfulness, which emphasizes noticing what is happening in the present moment while avoiding passing judgment on it. Another is reappraisal, which involves reassessing or reinterpreting a situation to change its emotional effect; instead of viewing things as unfavorable, we can redirect our attention to positive or manageable aspects.

Lastly, loving-kindness and self-compassion exercises can also teach us to reinterpret the world and ourselves by cultivating more caring and nurturing attitudes that help us self-soothe, decompress, and rejuvenate.

So as you’re living life, notice how you respond emotionally to different situations and pause to look inward. We have some say in how we choose to interpret our lives and the emotions that color them. Savor the positive feelings and perhaps consider what you can learn from the negative ones.

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Robert Backer
Robert Backer
Author (Ph.D.)
Robert Backer, Ph.D., is a psychologist, neuroscientist, academic researcher, and consultant. His work has spanned multiple institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Delaware, Columbia, Yale, NYU, and the NIH. His background encompasses clinical psychology and health care, as well as social, cognitive, and organizational psychology. He also enjoys classical Eastern and Western art, meditation, and exploring human potential.
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