“Relishing” triumphs is another way of saying replaying them in our minds. It feels good and we replay these moments over and over to have that feeling again. Our relation to negative experiences is different. Positive emotions are often an end in themselves (the ol’ dopamine high) but negative emotions are rarely sought out for their own sake. Don’t get me wrong – we may want to relive unpleasant experiences and we may obsess about them, but the point isn’t so much to feel bad as to achieve something else. The bad feeling is a means to an end – even when we’re not sure what that end is. Like wallowing in the muck may help us get to the root of some problem. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't.