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[Sadrice]

An amusing but highly informative experiment would be to recreate ITG's work in his "dwarven 'special' forces" project. Specifically, giving your dwarves excellent but incomplete armor and then locking them in a room with dismembering traps until they fall asleep on those traps (like glass serrated disks. Anything that will sever unprotected limbs but will reliably fail to cause damage against armored parts should work).  His goal was to, say, force his skilled biters and kickers to actually use their attacks by actually physically depriving them of alternate attacks like punching and hand based wrestling, but it could easily be used to test the psychological effects of amputation.

Basically, induce controlled reliable limb removal on a large number of dwarves. Ideally you would have a control group that is wounded to the same severity but with fully healable wounds, as well as another null group that is uninjured.  Back up your save.  Subject all three groups to various conditions, like high stress (having goblin corpses dumped into the testing chamber), high negative stress (no goblins, lots of great furniture), normal treatments, like goblin corpses plus great furniture, and goblin corpses with minimal furniture, and every other variant.  Measure dwarf stress levels after a standard length of time (a year is probably a good starting point), and also continue the experiment to see when high stress dwarves will finally snap, and check if that is related to previous injuries or discipline skill.

The statistics will get hairy fast, and this sounds like a lot of work, so don't expect me to do it, but I suspect it would teach us a great deal about dwarven personality as regards permanent stressors, like unhealable injuries.

[Sutremaine]

I thought red was the worst color for thoughts, but apparently it's yellow?

Going by the wiki, thought colour doesn't exactly match the severity. Red and yellow is never good, mind.

[KingBacon]

Is it me or are there more negative emotions than positive ones?

[Skullsploder]

If you're seeing more negative emotions than positive, you need better furniture. Platinum bridges and smelters are also excellent mood boosters, as well as platinum trade depots. If you have a statue in your meeting hall, designate that statue as a room, and suddenly all the furniture around it becomes "tastefully arranged."

[Putnam]

I think "in general" was meant.

And yeah, 69 negative emotions vs 45 positive ones.

[taptap]

I run an happy fort, maximum negative stress level (happiness) according to DT is -1000k. (40.19) Can't report on positive stress.

[KingBacon]

I think "in general" was meant.

And yeah, 69 negative emotions vs 45 positive ones.

Ya and from the wiki they seem all to be:
"Elated +1; Mildly Disgusted -1000"

Seems like Toady wants to punish players for forcing dorfs to live in a barren hole : P

[Putnam]

The emotions are completely independent from teh stress they give.

Also, higher numbers mean less, not more. It's divided by that amount.

[Sutremaine]

What's the maths on that?

[Putnam]

Thought has 1000 strength.

Emotion is "interested".

Thought gives -125 stress.

[Sutremaine]

'Interested' is listed as a +1 on the wiki.

[Putnam]

The wiki is wrong then.

https://github.com/DFHack/df-structures/blob/master/df.unit-thoughts.xml

It's a -8.

[Sutremaine]

Do all thoughts default to a strength of 1000?

[Putnam]

That was just an example. The strength is dependent on personality traits (and so are emotions felt). Grabbing a couple random examples, satisfaction at work on this particular citizen is 100 and fondness at talking to friend is 0. I'm guessing the strength goes down over time.

[bigcalm]

I'm trying to run a long term fort so naturally I'm experiencing the stressed dwarves problem right now.  The biggest problem is sieges - what happens right now is:

1) Goblins and trolls charge the gate.
2) Goblins and trolls get absolutely massacred.
3) Dwarves get really depressed cleaning up the bodies.

Note:
* You need to do something about any dwarf who has over 200k stress *now*.  150k or above is also cause for concern.  Do not let it get above 250k or it's pretty much impossible to get back down.

My solutions so far:

Furniture:
* Put doors and statues everywhere around the workshops.  Dwarves will see them whilst working and get happy thoughts.  Smoothing / engraving around workshops doesn't appear to do anything.  Try and keep a varied selection of furniture around and place any artifacts either in your dining room(s) or your statue rooms or highly trafficked areas.  If you're lucky enough to get an artifact that can be used in a workshop do so (e.g. artifact mechanism for screw press ; artifact barrel for dyers, etc).
* If a particular dwarf is unhappy, give them something they like (e.g. if they like green glass, put a green glass statue in their room).

Conflict
* Try to predict roughly where battles will take place and put an atom smasher nearby - on my map goblin sieges always appear in the middle of the top part of the map, so I've got an atom smasher near to where the bodies will end up.
  -- On conclusion of the battle, z->stocks->body parts -> unforbid -> dump ; z->stocks->corpses->unforbid->dump ; go to the refuse piles containing bones, shells, hair, skulls, teeth and remove the dump (I have separate stockpiles for pretty much everything).  Do not "claim" any armour/weapons of fallen enemies yet - wait until the dumping has finished.  This should ensure that the bodies lying on the battlefield get cleared away as quickly as possible.
  -- I've yet to decide exactly what to do with caged things that can't be tamed.  Right now my strategy of building the cages in a honeypot trap and letting a forgotten beast massacre them at a later date is unsatisfactory at best.

The Unhappy Bunnies
* Have a military squad (or several) to place unhappy dwarves in.  After a battle or if there are corpses needing hauling those dwarves should be activated, sent to their barracks and not allowed to see bodies and body parts. 
* I also have an area where I can isolate dwarves in their military squad - this is an area with 5 rooms which are as nice as I can make them (smoothed/engraved/artifacts) - a dining room, a statue room, a room with 2 separate stockpiles for food and booze that take from the main food/booze stockpile, a dormitory and a barracks.  These rooms can be sealed with a door and a bridge.
 -- When these dwarves are really depressed, remove these rooms from the burrow, set military alert on and set the military squad of depressed dwarves to station in that area.  It can be tricky getting all of them there at the same time but persist (small squads can help)!  Once they're there, forbid the door, and pull the bridge to seal them in.  You can then take them off station, add the rooms back into the burrow and leave them be.  Set them to train if you want, doesn't really matter a great deal - some training in discipline may help more testing needed.  They will complain they have no shoulder to cry on but this doesn't seem to stop their stress decreasing.  (To make this trickier you should really have some way of preventing them getting cave-adapted but this can be fiddly).
 -- A very stressed dwarf (200k stress) will take over 3 years to decrease back down to below 100k - but they can be allowed to wander around the fort as long as there is no body hauling going on.  Definitely remove refuse hauling from any of the really stressed regardless.
 -- Ideally equip the military squad with metal armour, as then they won't get any negative clothing thoughts.
 -- You may find you need more than one military squad and set up like this (it can help to rotate people in and out of squads as they become less unhappy).  Currently I have "The Unhappy Bunnies", "The Hares of Despair" and "The Long-Faced Leverets".  I'm also running out of synonyms for rabbits but that's a separate issue.
 -- You won't be able to completely isolate your mayor or your duchess like this.