In order to achieve our highest potential level of happiness and satisfaction with our lives, it is imperative that we learn actions within our control that we can take to overcome this “negativity bias”. Earlier in human history, paying attention to bad, dangerous, and negative threats in the world was literally a matter of life and death. Political Psychology, 27: 1–28. And that is due to the brain's "negativity bias…
The negativity bias is the phenomena by which humans give more psychological weight to bad experiences than a good ones. This meant they were also more likely to hand down the genes that made them more attentive to danger.The evolutionary perspective suggests that this tendency to dwell on the negative more than the positive is simply one way the brain tries to keep us safe. Bad, as it is often put, is stronger than good. Negativity in evaluations. Very young infants tend to pay greater attention to positive facial expression and tone of voice, but this begins to shift as they near one year of age. Infants are thought to interpret ambiguous situations on the basis of how others around them react.
While we may no longer need to be on constant high alert as our early ancestors needed to be in order to survive, the negativity bias still has a starring role in how our brains operate. In fact, Brickman and Campbell (1971) postulated a “hedonic treadmill” by which long-term happiness will remain roughly constant regardless of what happens to an individual. In S. Feldman (Ed. ), Feldman, S. (1966). Neuroscientific evidence has shown that there is greater neural processing in the brain in response to negative stimuli.
), This doesn’t mean ignoring potential dangers or wearing rose-colored glasses—it simply means refocusing so that you give fair and equal weight to good events. However, the accident victims were much slower to adapt to their new fate. Behavioral economics. Voting behaviors have been shown to be more affected or motivated by negative information than positive: people tend to be more motivated to vote against a candidate because of negative information than they are to vote for a candidate because of positive information.This diagnostic preference for negative traits over positive traits is thought to be a consequence of behavioral expectations: there is a general expectation that, owing to social requirements and regulations, people will generally behave positively and exhibit positive traits. The negativity bias can be seriously detrimental to our work productivity.
The answer is, for the same reason political smear campaigns outpull positive ones. The negative bias can have a variety of real-world effects on how people think and act. Although this inclination towards fear-based thinking increases our chance for surviving threats and passing along our genes, it limits our ability to experience the joy and peace that create a truly fulfilling life in the 21Our bias toward negative thinking does not only influence how we act, such as to flee a situation when we perceive a threat, but also how we feel and the emotions we generate in response to the circumstances of our lives. When you get home from work and someone asks you how your day was, you reply that it was terrible—even though it was overall quite good despite that one negative incident.
News and the Negativity Bias: What the Research Says. Brain studies indicate that around this time, babies begin to experience greater brain responses to negative stimuli. We buy into the idea that if we accomplish certain goals, we can finally be happy at some point in the future and end up chasing an illusion instead of focusing on being happy now. You then find yourself stewing over his words for the rest of the workday. Probably. When studying both positive and negative behaviors, participants tend to recall more negative behaviors during a later memory test than they do positive behaviors, even after controlling for serial position effects.When asked to recall a recent emotional event, people tend to report negative events more often than they report positive events,Studies of the negativity bias have also been related to research within the domain of However, it is worth noting that Rozin and Royzman were never able to find loss aversion in decision making Research points to a correlation between political affiliation and negativity bias Although most of the research concerning the negativity bias has been conducted with adults (particularly undergraduate students), there have been a small number of infant studies also suggesting negativity biases. If you miss out on an opportunity for pleasure, you will live to have another opportunity tomorrow.
Nastiness just makes a bigger impact on our brains.
Since negative information draws greater attention, it also may be seen as having greater validity. The negativity bias is the phenomena by which humans give more psychological weight to bad experiences than a good ones. (Achor, 2010) In our society, most of us are familiar with how to be miserable and depressed, but few know how to thrive and be fulfilled!The commonly held theory on happiness is that, in order to be happy, one must be successful by society’s standards and have the new house, new car, ideal body, and perfect relationship to show for it. The fact that a negativity bias in physiological responses to video news is readily evident in cross-national data using stimuli with high external validity is of real significance.