Why we sigh
Back in the days when I was a lecturer, I used to sigh a lot when I was marking lab reports and essays.
What does this tell you about my experience of marking?
Probably you think that I didn’t like it much. And you’d be right – I loved teaching, but I never liked marking, and when I was a lecturer, it never seemed to end. It made me frustrated and anxious, because I wanted to be able to do all the aspects of my job well. Marking seemed to swallow up everything else, from teaching prep to doing research.
But is that negative emotional experience really why I was sighing?
An aside about sigh-ence
If you were interested in researching when and why people sigh, how would you do it?
No, Adam, Jamie, and Jeffrey, you may not “simply covertly manipulate people’s social media accounts and observe how they respond”. Good grief.
Here are some *ethical* possibilities… * You could ask people how much they’ve sighed under different circumstances, which is simple but open to some problems. Will people remember how often they’ve sighed? Will they assume that they’ve sighed more when experiencing negative emotions, even if that’s not true? * You could ask people to come into a research lab and watch them while they’re doing something you think will make them sigh, recording how many sighs they make. This gets rid of the problems of reporting your own sighing, but creates some new ones. Will a sigh always be visible or audible to the experimenter? How much does this slightly odd situation tell us about how people behave in their everyday lives? * You could ask people to wear some kind of device that records their breathing – like the Lifeshirt system, a t-shirt with sensors built in – as they go about their daily lives. For me, this is the best solution so far, as it doesn’t rely on your own or an experimenter’s ability to recognise when sighing is happening, and it can be used to test how people respond to real life, not the lab. However, it’s still a strange thing to be wearing a t-shirt recording breathing and heartrate (maybe less so if you’re used to wearing something like an Apple watch) so this could still affect how you behave.
A sigh of relief?
Many people believe that sighing is linked to emotions. When researchers asked psychology undergraduates what specific emotional states might make people sigh more frequently, the list was mostly negative – things like sadness, disappointment, irritation, frustration, weariness, resignation and dejection. Intriguingly, the students also suggested that sighing frequently could also indicate positive emotions like love, satisfaction and relief (though if you’re sighing out of relief that means you’ve probably very recently had a negative emotion that is now over).
Do people actually sigh when they’re feeling these kinds of emotions? Well, maybe.
In a study of pairs of people conversing, researchers found that their participants were most likely to sigh around the time they said something that indicated frustration, sadness or excitement. But sighs can mean different things in different conversational contexts, and can sometimes indicate something pretty neutral like ‘I am about to speak’ or ‘I heard what you just said’.
In a small study of women with rheumatoid arthritis, participants who reported higher levels of depression also sighed more. And people doing complex, presumably stressful mental arithmetic tasks tend to sigh more than when they’re doing something relatively relaxing like watching March of the Penguins. But a study with a much larger number of participants found that there was very little association between how often people sighed and whether they were experiencing negative emotions like stress, loneliness or depression – the researchers even found that the more their male participants sighed, the less lonely they said they were. People also sigh when experiencing emotions that we might not expect to produce sighs, like the anxiety of preparing to give a public music performance.
This might seem like a dead end, but two of these studies actually give us a clue to another reason people might be sighing.
The sigh-cology of deep thinking
Back to me and my marking. I was experiencing negative emotions, but there was something else happening too. I was doing something difficult.
Here are just some of the questions I was asking myself as I marked each lab report or essay:
This sentence is ambiguous – what did the student mean? How well organised are their ideas? How can I explain why this mistake matters in a way that makes sense to them? What mark shall I give this student? What have they done well? What have they done badly? Which of the good and bad things about this piece of work shall I focus on when I write my feedback? Have other students made similar errors to this one and do I therefore need to revisit a topic in my next session with my students? Will I finish this marking before I need to go to my next meeting?
Fun fact: my habitual expression while marking was the inspiration for the thinky-face emoji.
Psychologists would call this high cognitive load. In other words, I had a lot on my mind – and I was also worried about getting my marking right, because it could have a significant negative impact on my students if I made mistakes. So, I was probably thinking hard like the people in the mental arithmetic study and feeling nervous like the people in the music performance study. This matters because when we face a situation that requires a lot of thinking or causes anxiety, our breathing gets irregular. When we sigh – and it seems to have to be a sigh that we do spontaneously, not an instructed sigh in response to ‘take a deep breath’ – it can act as a reset mechanism to make breathing regular again. In situations of sustained deep thinking or anxiety, you might go around a little loop: tense up, breathe irregularly, sigh, breathe regularly, tense up again, etc. Again, this varies according to the person and the situation, because not everyone displays this sighing-as-a-reset behaviour, and if you’re thinking deeply because you’re reading, you might be more likely to sigh if you’re reading from paper than if you’re reading on a smartphone.
While you’ve probably noticed that you or other people breathe irregularly when worried, anxious or panicked – maybe you’ve seen a film where someone breathes heavily as they hide from the baddies, maybe you’ve had a panic attack – you might not have noticed that you do it when you’re thinking deeply. As far as I know, it’s not actually clear why deep thinking causes this irregularity, though we do know that various aspects of breathing can influence perception, thinking, and emotions, so why shouldn’t the relationship go both ways?
Don’t tell me you didn’t see this visual joke coming.
So, what shall we do with these two explanations of sighing? Is it a response to emotions or a response to deep thinking? Based on a study where the researchers cruelly gave their participants an unsolveable problem, I think both might be true. In this study, the participants’ sighs and comments were recorded as they attempted to solve the problem for ten minutes. Sighs seemed to happen when people were having a break after a failed attempt – which might be both a reset of breathing and an emotional response. Specifically, the researchers interpreted the emotion as being about a mismatch between what you hoped for and what you get. This explains both negative sighs, which might occur when you get less than you hoped for, and positive sighs, which might occur when you get more than you hoped for.
The reality is, though, we probably sigh for lots of reasons, from boredom to deep thinking to increasing the levels of oxygen in our blood. A sigh may not be just a sigh, but it might not have the meaning you initially assume it does.