Disrupting the negativity bias
I had an exceptionally good week last week. Positive things happened in my classroom; my tennis team enjoyed a couple of big unexpected wins, including an upset in our state tournament; and I am finally feeling healthy after two weeks of an annoyingly persistent head cold. My students are lovely this year and even though it’s only the second week of October, there seems to be an unusual level of good energy and productivity in my classes. I have the best work family, with endless camaraderie and unconditional support, and I get to spend most beautiful fall afternoons outside on the tennis courts with an extremely nice bunch of young women, coaching a sport I love.
Why is it then that I spent most of the weekend obsessing about one brief misunderstanding with a student?! The one negative thing in a long week of positives and I couldn’t seem to get it out of my head.
The negativity bias is no joke. And, even though I pride myself on feeling confidently happy and optimistic on most days, I realize that sometimes even I can’t escape the hard wiring of my own brain.
In psychology, the negativity bias suggests that when human beings are exposed to negative and positive stimuli of equal magnitude, they are likely to experience the negative more intensely. According to a broad research review in a National Institute of Health publication, “...there is ample evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults process and use positive versus negative information: adults are far more attentive to and much more influenced in most psychological domains by negative than by positive information” (Vaish et al.)
This explains why we feel the sting of a rebuke more intensely than we feel the joy of praise and why we are more likely to perceive bad news as more credible than good news. It is why we remember traumatic events in our lives more clearly than we remember joyous events and why we spend more time ruminating about negative little things than we do celebrating an equal number of little victories.
Psychologists have long attributed the negativity bias to a critical evolutionary adaptive function, in which paying attention to negative stimuli helped humans to identify danger and thus improved their chances of survival. Other researchers have identified the ways that neuroscience perpetuates this leftover evolutionary trait. Psychologist Rick Hansen explains that negative emotions rouse the amygdala, the almond-shaped brain structure which acts as the alarm bell of our brains. According to Hansen, “the amygdala uses about two-thirds of its neurons to look for bad news. Once it sounds the alarm, negative events and experiences get quickly stored in memory, in contrast to positive events and experiences, which usually need to be held in awareness for a dozen or more seconds to transfer from short-term memory buffers to long-term storage” (Jaworski).
So then, it is no wonder why we can have a birthday full of love and good wishes from friends and family near and afar, but lay in bed on that very night and obsess about the one friend who didn’t call.
The question for me, then, becomes how can we take our knowledge and understanding of the negativity bias and train our brains to override it? Without being totally unrealistic or oblivious to the myriad of personal and world problems, how do we consistently and reliably put negative thoughts in their place, while at the same time, elevating, celebrating and feeling grateful for the positive ones. The good news, according to many researchers, is that we do this naturally as we get older. One study attributes this positivity effect in older adults’ memories to be the result of a greater focus on emotional regulation, which leads older adults to spend more of their precious time thinking about—and enhancing—positive information and diminishing the efficacy of negative information (Mather et al.) Of course this isn’t true for all older adults, but it does suggest that we humans do have some agency over our own emotional response to the world, despite the hard wiring of our brains.
It turns out that much has been written on this topic and as I began to explore it more thoroughly, a couple of ideas really resonated with me:
Change begins with metacognitive awareness. Being aware of the way we think and process information allows us to gently recognize when we’re succumbing to the negativity bias and going down that rabbit hole of negative thinking. When the processing of an interaction or an event leads to the kind of obsessive over-thinking that keeps us awake at night, we might try doing something that brings us satisfaction to disrupt the pattern. For me, it’s usually something physical, like going for a run or a long walk or if it happens in the evening when I’m trying to fall asleep, I rely on my favorite volume of poetry by Mary Oliver, which sits on my nightstand for just this purpose. The important thing, it seems, is to recognize what’s happening in our own response and to believe that the activity that we’re using to distract ourselves has the power to disrupt that response. And, of course, the more we do it with success, the more we believe in its efficacy.
How we talk to ourselves matters. In almost every article I read about this topic, psychologists emphasized the importance of our inner dialogues. Using our ‘conversations’ with ourselves to reframe a situation; to remind ourselves of our own good intentions; and to map a positive course forward is paramount. Cultivating this self-talk can begin with a positive ‘trigger affirmation’ which can be a short, simple phrase we say to ourselves that prompts us to remember our own power to control our emotional destiny in almost any situation. Mine is short and simple and I practice it just about every day on my way out the door.
Amplify the positive. We should train ourselves to ruminate about the lovely things that happen to us almost every day. Replay them in slow motion, turn them over in our minds and connect them to the other lovely things that have happened to us lately. And then, we should talk about them to the people in our lives who we know will celebrate with us; we should post about them on social media, if we feel like it; or we should write in our journals about them, or say a prayer of thanks for them. We should never be shy to share good news about ourselves—or about others. When we really start to string these positive, celebration-worthy things together regularly, not only do we start to build the interior narrative that we are extremely lucky, but we actually start to believe it.
Works Cited
Jaworski, Margaret (2020) Negativity Bias: Why the Bad Stuff Sticks. Psycom
Mather M, Carstensen LL. Aging and motivated cognition: the positivity effect in attention and memory. Trends Cogn Sci. 2005 Oct;9(10):496-502. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.08.005. PMID: 16154382.
Vaish, A., Grossmann, T., & Woodward, A. (2008). Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development. Psychological Bulletin, 134(3), 383–403.
