Why do we sigh?

Why oh why, oh why do we sigh?

It’s not just the domain of bored teenagers and exasperated pre-schoolers – most of us are likely to heave the odd sigh in pretty everyday situations.

So why do we do it? "Sighing and the interpretation of sighs in everyday life seem never to have been the subject of psychological research," writes University of Oslo researcher Karl Teigen in a 2008 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

His study Is a sigh "just a sigh"? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task– which recently earned him a 2011 Ig Nobel prize from an organisation of Improbable Research (see Medical Matters on page 6 for more about these) – looked at sighs from various different angles.

In it, Teigen used questionnaires and interviews to probe what participants think about sighs.

In general, sighs were associated with negative feelings, but context was important: “Sighs in private situations are more often believed to express sadness, whereas a sigh in social situations more often indicate frustration, boredom, tiredness, or resignation.”

In another experiment, Teigen asked participants to solve a difficult problem. “Sighs occurred throughout the experiment, some sighed when they received the task, and some when they handed it in, but most sighs appeared to occur in the breaks after one or several fruitless attempts,” he writes.

In drawing together the findings, Teigen concludes that “in the prototypical case, a sigh expresses a mismatch between ideals and realities. A belief is disconfirmed, a hope has to be abandoned, a wish is disappointed, a dream or some other cherished possession may be lost. In addition, we realise that we are helpless, there is nothing we can do, fight or flight are no options, we simply have to resign and to ‘let go’.”

Sigh.