New research suggests anthropomorphising your emotions can help you control them. But how do you actually go about it?

In the Pixar film Inside Out, the emotions of an 11-year-old girl are personified as perky Joy, petulant Disgust and hulking Anger. Sadness – voiced by The American Office’s Phyllis Smith – is, predictably, a downer with a deep side-parting and a chunky knit. Amy Poehler’s Joy can hardly stand to be around her, like a colleague you would time your trips to the tea point to avoid.

But the takeaway of the 2015 film – said by Variety to “for ever change the way people think about the way people think” – was that both emotions were necessary, and Sadness was as valid a part of life as Joy. Now there is a case for not only accepting Sadness, as in Inside Out – but embodying her, too. Researchers from Hong Kong and Texas recently found that individuals asked to think of their sadness as a person reported feeling less sad afterwards, a result they attributed to the increased distance perceived between the self and the emotion. Read more

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