Is sadness relative, or is it a continuum? Can one person's sadness equal another's?

While we can identify sadness in people, the sadness sensation is extremely personal and subjective. Common sense struggles to compare and quantify feelings, but such approach is erroneous and counterproductive. Sadness is an extremely personal - and as such, subjective - state of mind. Being a product of our beliefs and personality, one can't compare it to other's people sadness. Hence, if sadness, as a psychological object, is to be analysed, I would say it is a continuum, given the degrees of freedom of the variables envolved.

you can't really compare sadness. there are different kinds of miseries. some last long some don't .

It depends. One person's sadness can never equal another, they may suffer the same loss but never at the same frequency. Everyone handles things differently and I could only hope that it gets better for everyone.

Yes. Lets blame this on the Mirror Neurons. Example: You're walking through school and suddenly someone is being bullied. Automatically, you recoil in sympathy. We are, from an evolutionary perspective, programmed to be automatically empathetic towards the problem others are having. We as each one, are none the less, vulnerable but as a group we seem to be stronger, more assertive. We're wired to feel empathy, to "walk In another persons shoes." The sad story of a stranger can bring us memories of similar events that have happened to us previously, or in another case we feel what it is that person could be feeling, we relate, we sympathize.

I'd imagine it's on a continuum. And I'd certainly say one person's sadness can equal another's. We are in large part unoriginal in our misery and happiness which I find some strange comfort in.

Sadness is something that can't be measured. It's a bit too subjective and varies from person to person. That's why you can't really say someone's sadness is "equal", or perhaps even "similar" to someone else's. Everyone is sad in their own way.

Everyone feels sadness differently. One person's sadness cannot equal another's, because they both experience it differently. Someone can't say they are more sad than someone else, because you don't know how the other person experiences and feels the sadness. Just be accepting and be there for eachother.

sadeness is not something that is really the same in any two people. Some people can be sad about not getting the pizza they want or someone can be sad about being abused and depressed. Sometimes sadness can equal, but take two different people with two very different back rounds, and I think no. One sadness cannot equal another. Maybe in the intensity of the sadness but the reasoning could be what sets them so different.

Everyone feels differently, its impossible to compare what one person calls sadness to what somebody else does. And we are all affected by it differently too.

For me, sadness can be both. Relative sadness is situational: you get sad seeing tragedy on the news; you get sad when a friend says something mean; you get sad when you lose a pet. Sadness in a continuum means you might be overall depressed because of the sequence of losses you've experienced.. Like deciding to have an online relationship when you were just 8 only to find out that the man was a pervert and now all your photos are on the internet, then your dad finds out and beats you unconcious which then triggers your mom to report him to the police and consequently ask for a divorce. Now your dad's in jail, your parents are divorced, your mom is depressed and hardly functional, your baby sister has lost both parents and you are now the adult in the family and of course you blame yourself for ruining your pefect family.