Relief is a positive emotion experienced when something unpleasant, painful or distressing has not happened or has come to an end. Relief is often accompanied with a sigh, which signals emotional transition. People from all over the world can recognise sighs with relief, and judge relief to be a fundamental emotion. In a 2017 study published in Psychology, relief is suggested to be an emotion that can reinforceanxiety through avoidance, or be an adaptive coping mechanism when stressed or frustrated.
Types of relief (near-miss and task-completion)
Relief is often discussed as one concept, but when asking people to think of scenarios where they experienced relief, about half thought of near-miss scenarios, and the other half thought of task-completion scenarios. Near-miss relief is when you narrowly avoid something aversive, for example, a test you did not study for was cancelled. Task-completed relief is when you finish an aversive task, for instance you complete your tax returns. To test whether there really are two distinct types of relief, the researchers created a scenario where people had to sing a song in front of an experiment leader after listening to the song once. In one condition the participants were told they did not have to sing after all. In the other condition they sang the song. Near-miss relief led to more counterfactual thinking, and also feeling more socially isolated. It appears that near-miss relief triggers people to think more about the scenario for the future, maybe how to avoid something like it happening again. Task-completion relief, on the other hand, might reinforce endurance of difficult tasks.
Reinforcing avoidance
Others have also suggested that relief can reinforce avoidance, by rewarding the escape from a scary situation, relief might help create pathological avoidance which can maintain anxiety disorders . For example, if you almost had to give a speech in front of people, but it was cancelled last minute, the relief you feel from not having to do it could reward the avoidance. Next time you might remember how good it felt not to give the speech and decline the offer to do another one. Thus your fear of public speaking is maintained by the feeling of relief.
Sigh of relief
It has been found that rats sigh with relief. Because rats are social animals, the researchers suggested that maybe sighing with relief function as a social signal to other rats. We do not know whether sighing is a social signal, however, and when asked in an experiment, people estimated that they sighed as much around others as alone. When people are given a difficult task, for instance an impossible puzzle, they sigh between attempts or when they give up. When we sigh with relief it is by definition a transition from something negative to a positive state. One dominating theory suggests that sighing with relief resets us, both emotionally and physiologically. This resettheory of relief captures how sighing with relief signals the end of a negative state, and resets us for another one. If this is true, it explains why people who are anxious sigh more, and why we sigh more when we are working on a difficult mental task. Sighing in these scenarios might be to attempt to induce psychophysiological relief. Based on these findings, it is proposed that sighs regulate stress and negative emotions, which might be an adaptive coping mechanism when we are frustrated, stressed or anxious.
