Varieties of mixed emotional experience

Experience sampling data reveal that people can experience mixed emotions (i.e., the co-occurrence of positive and negative affect) in daily life and that some pairs of opposite-valence emotions co-occur more often than others. Both experience sampling and laboratory data suggest that, not surprisingly, people often experience mixed emotions when dealing with complex events that can readily be appraised as having both pleasant and unpleasant aspects (e.g., events that foster the pursuit of one goal but thwart that of another). More intriguingly, some events that can only readily be appraised as having unpleasant aspects (e.g., heartbreaking film scenes depicting a character's death) can also elicit mixed emotions.