Why You Should Embrace Your Darker Emotions

The count will vary depending on which expert you ask, but for our purposes, let's say there are seven basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, contempt and disgust. All these emotions are still with us because they’ve helped us survive through several million years of evolution. And yet five of them—anger, sadness, fear, contempt and disgust—are clearly on the not-so-comfortable end of the affective spectrum. (“Surprise” can go either way.