I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be” — “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” Talk about mixed emotions. A happy-sad state can be as perplexing to people as to psychologists. This is not about “smiling depression,” where someone feels emotional pain, but masks those feelings with a happy façade. Rather, it’s truly experiencing those two conflicting emotions at once. ''This is one of the reasons that most scientific scales for emotion include a separate dimension for positive emotion and negative emotion — they're not a continuum'''