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 contentedly¹ 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 perpetuates² a collective delusion³ in which we all strive to present an unrealistically happy front because we think that's the norm.

有没有觉得别人总是泰然自若？环顾四周，人们在午餐时惬意闲谈，笑语盈盈地通电话，或者醉心于书本里的世界。然而亚历山大?乔丹和他的同事们却认为，大部分人都倾向于低估他人的负面情绪体验，久而久之这种错觉让我们努力在人前摆出一种快乐的假象，并认为这样很正常。

Jordan's team began their investigation⁴ 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.

乔丹的心理小组邀请了63位大学生，请他们描述近来经历的正面和负面的情绪体验。如研究者所料，负面的例子(如争吵，求爱被拒)比正面的例子(如参加一个有趣的聚会，享用了一顿大餐)多，而且一般负面的东西多涉及隐私，会激发学生试图压抑的情绪。

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.

其中最普遍的经历被分发给另外80名同学，然后记录他们过去两周经历过类似事件的频率，并猜测同龄人经历的频率。这项重要的结果显示学生们都低估了同龄人经历负面情绪，而且稍微高估了正面情绪的经历。

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 ruminate⁵ more, thus suggesting that underestimating others' misery⁶ could be harmful to our own well-being⁷. 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.

一项最终的研究表明惯于低估同龄人负面情绪体验的学生往往更容易感觉孤单，对生活不满，更容易沉思多虑，这表明低估他人的烦恼对自身也有坏处，反之亦然，即孤单和不满可能让我们更容易觉得别人比自己更快乐，二者也可能会相互作用。然而研究人员称需要进一步研究才能证明。

A fascinating implication of this research is that it could help explain the popularity of tragic⁸ art, be that in drama, music or books. "In fictional⁹ 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."

这项研究结果也可以用来解释悲剧类的艺术作品为何广受欢迎。研究者说：“在悲剧中，人们能够目睹‘生活中的悲惨事情'，而这也正是‘舞台故事的来源'，这有助于减轻人们自己的负面情绪体验。”