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Dampening, which minimizes positive emotions, is linked to cognitive-affective depressive symptoms.

Believing one doesn’t deserve positive feelings relates to current depressive severity, not onset.

Responses to positive emotions may be as important as negative emotion regulation in depression.

You get good news. For a split second, you feel happy.

Then a thought appears almost automatically:

“This won’t last.”“Something bad will probably happen.”“I don’t deserve this.”

“This won’t last.”“Something bad will probably happen.”“I don’t deserve this.”

And, just like that, the feeling fades.

If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many people have this tendency to mentally downplay or “undo” positive emotions. This is called dampening, or the tendency to reduce the intensity or duration of positive emotions through certain thought patterns. Research has shown that dampening is associated with mental health conditions such as depression. But both depression and dampening are more complex than they may appear at first glance.

Not all depressive symptoms and not all dampening thoughts are the same

Depression is not a single, uniform experience. It can involve sadness, hopelessness, worthlessness, loss of interest, fatigue, sleep problems, and concentration difficulties. Different people experience different combinations of these symptoms. Similarly, dampening of positive emotions is not just one process. It includes different thoughts and patterns that may influence mental health in distinct ways.

When researchers group all depressive symptoms together and all dampening thoughts together, they may miss important details about how specific thoughts relate to specific symptoms. Understanding these more precise relationships could help improve prevention and treatment. To better understand this, we took a more fine-grained approach. Using large samples and both cross-sectional and longitudinal data, we looked at whether specific dampening thoughts predicted specific depressive symptoms. Using machine learning and network analysis, we identified which dampening patterns appeared most important.

The two dampening thoughts that stood out

Across different studies and analytic approaches, two dampening thoughts consistently emerged as the strongest predictors of depressive symptoms:

“These positive feelings won’t last.”

“My streak of luck is going to end soon.”

What these thoughts have in common is that they are future-focused and reflect beliefs about the instability of positive experiences. These thoughts were strongly linked to core cognitive-emotional symptoms of depression, including:

Fearful or anxious feelings

Importantly, these associations remained even after accounting for people’s current symptoms. This suggests that these dampening thoughts may not simply reflect existing depressive symptoms but may also contribute to increased vulnerability over time.

The role of “I don’t deserve this”

A third dampening thought also stood out: “I don’t deserve this positive feeling.” Unlike the future-focused dampening thoughts, this belief was closely tied to feelings of worthlessness and a negative self-view. However, it was less predictive of future depressive symptoms. This pattern suggests that this type of dampening may act more as a maintaining factor. It may reinforce an already negative self-view once depressive symptoms are present rather than driving their development.

What these findings mean for prevention and treatment

Both key dampening thoughts that predict depressive symptoms share a common theme: They anticipate the loss of positive experiences. This fits with broader research showing that depression is linked to difficulty imagining positive futures and a tendency to overestimate negative outcomes. When people come to believe that good moments are fragile or temporary, it may become harder to fully engage with positive experiences when they occur. Over time, this pattern may reinforce hopelessness, one of the central cognitive features of depression. This finding points to a potential intervention target: guided future-thinking exercises that help people gently envision positive experiences, building the sense that good moments can endure and that the future may hold more positivity than expected.

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The finding that self-deserving dampening thoughts are closely tied to worthlessness also highlights the potential importance of addressing negative self-beliefs directly when depressive symptoms are already present. Approaches that target self-criticism and promote self-compassion may be particularly relevant in these cases.

The overlooked role of positive emotion regulation

Much of depression research has traditionally focused on how people manage negative emotions. But these findings add to growing evidence that how people respond to positive emotions may be just as important.

Becoming aware of these patterns may be an important first step. Noticing thoughts like “This won’t last” or “I don’t deserve this positive feeling” does not mean forcing yourself to think positively. Instead, it may involve recognizing these thoughts as mental habits rather than facts. For individuals who notice a consistent tendency to dampen positive emotions, discussing this pattern with a mental health professional may be worthwhile. It may represent an important, but often overlooked, factor in the development or maintenance of depressive symptoms.

Bogaert, L., Dunn, B. D., Hallford, D. J., Everaert, J., & Raes, F. (2026). When Joy Feels Wrong: Identifying Key Dampening Features Predicting Depressive Symptoms Using Machine Learning and Network Analysis. Clinical Psychological Science.

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