[2][3][4] In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative.
The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.
[6][7] The notion of negative differentiation is consistent with the mobilization-minimization hypothesis,[8] which posits that negative events, as a consequence of this complexity, require a greater mobilization of cognitive resources to deal with the affective experience and a greater effort to minimize the consequences.
Most of the early evidence suggesting a negativity bias stems from research on social judgments and impression formation, in which it became clear that negative information was typically more heavily weighted when participants were tasked with forming comprehensive evaluations and impressions of other target individuals.
[2][14] People consider negative information to be more important to impression formation and, when it is available to them, they are subsequently more confident.
It is expected that a dishonest person will occasionally be honest, but this honesty will not counteract the prior demonstrations of dishonesty.
The presumption that negative information has greater diagnostic accuracy is also evident in voting patterns.
[22][23] As noted by researcher Jill Klein, "character weaknesses were more important than strengths in determining...the ultimate vote".
Studies reported in a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Carey Morewedge (2009) found that people exhibit a negativity bias in attribution of external agency, such that they are more likely to attribute negative outcomes to the intentions of another person than similar neutral and positive outcomes.
[8][27] Neurological differences also point to greater processing of negative information: participants exhibit greater event-related potentials when reading about, or viewing photographs of, people performing negative acts that were incongruent with their traits than when reading about incongruent positive acts.
[28][29][30] This additional processing leads to differences between positive and negative information in attention, learning, and memory.
Also, people were found to show greater orienting responses following negative than positive outcomes, including larger increases in pupil diameter, heart rate, and peripheral arterial tone [34][35] Importantly, this preferential attendance to negative information is evident even when the affective nature of the stimuli is irrelevant to the task itself.
This difference in response latencies indicates that greater attention was devoted to processing the trait itself when it was negative.
Research concerning the effects of punishment and reward on learning suggests that punishment for incorrect responses is more effective in enhancing learning than are rewards for correct responses—learning occurs more quickly following bad events than good events.
[4] This issue of negativity and loss aversion as it relates to decision-making is most notably addressed by Drs.
However, it is worth noting that Rozin and Royzman were never able to find loss aversion in decision making.
Amrisha Vaish, Tobias Grossman, and Amanda Woodward suggests the negativity bias may emerge during the second half of an infant's first year, although the authors also note that research on the negativity bias and affective information has been woefully neglected within the developmental literature.