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Have you ever had the feeling that everyone else seems so sorted, so at ease? You look about you and see friends chatting over lunch, people laughing on their mobiles, others escaping contentedly through novels or newspapers. According to Alexander Jordan and colleagues, most of us have such a tendency to underestimate other people's experience of negative emotion. In turn the researchers think this skewed perception perpetuates a collective delusion in which we all strive to present an unrealistically happy front because we think that's the norm.
有沒有覺得別人總是泰然自若？環(huán)顧四周，人們在午餐時愜意閑談，笑語盈盈地通電話，或者醉心于書本里的世界。然而亞歷山大?喬丹和他的同事們卻認為，大部分人都傾向于低估他人的負面情緒體驗，久而久之這種錯覺讓我們努力在人前擺出一種快樂的假象，并認為這樣很正常。
Jordan's team began their investigation by asking 63 undergrads to describe recent negative and positive emotional experiences they'd had. As expected, the negative examples (eg had an argument; was rejected by a boy/girl)， more than the positive examples (eg attended a fun party; had a great meal)， tended to occur in private and to provoke emotions that the students had attempted to suppress.
喬丹的心理小組邀請了63位大學生，請他們描述近來經(jīng)歷的正面和負面的情緒體驗。如研究者所料，負面的例子(如爭吵，求愛被拒)比正面的例子(如參加一個有趣的聚會，享用了一頓大餐)多，而且一般負面的東西多涉及隱私，會激發(fā)學生試圖壓抑的情緒。
The most frequently cited of these experiences were then put to a separate set of 80 students whose task was to say how many times in the last two weeks they had lived through something similar, and to estimate how often their peers had. The important finding here was that the students consistently underestimated their peers' experience of negative events whilst slightly over-estimating their peers' experience of positive situations.
其中最普遍的經(jīng)歷被分發(fā)給另外80名同學，然后記錄他們過去兩周經(jīng)歷過類似事件的頻率，并猜測同齡人經(jīng)歷的頻率。這項重要的結(jié)果顯示學生們都低估了同齡人經(jīng)歷負面情緒，而且稍微高估了正面情緒的經(jīng)歷。
A final study showed that students with a greater tendency to underestimate their peers' negative emotions also tended to feel more lonely, less satisfied with life and to ruminate more, thus suggesting that underestimating others' misery could be harmful to our own well-being. Of course the causal direction could run the other way (i.e. being lonely and discontented could predispose us to think everyone else is happier than they are)， or both ways. The researchers acknowledged more research is needed to test this.
一項最終的研究表明慣于低估同齡人負面情緒體驗的學生往往更容易感覺孤單，對生活不滿，更容易沉思多慮，這表明低估他人的煩惱對自身也有壞處，反之亦然，即孤單和不滿可能讓我們更容易覺得別人比自己更快樂，二者也可能會相互作用。然而研究人員稱需要進一步研究才能證明。
A fascinating implication of this research is that it could help explain the popularity of tragic art, be that in drama, music or books. "In fictional tragedy, people are given the opportunity to witness 'the terrible things in life' that are ordinarily 'played out behind the scenes'," the researchers said, "which may help to depathologize people's own negative emotional experiences."
這項研究結(jié)果也可以用來解釋悲劇類的藝術(shù)作品為何廣受歡迎。研究者說：“在悲劇中，人們能夠目睹‘生活中的悲慘事情'，而這也正是‘舞臺故事的來源'，這有助于減輕人們自己的負面情緒體驗。”
