Negativity effect

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature (e.g. unpleasant thoughts, emotions, or social interactions; harmful/traumatic events) have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. 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.Paul Rozin and Edward Royzman proposed four elements of the negativity bias in order to explain its manifestation: negative potency, steeper negative gradients, negativity dominance, and negative differentiation.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. Generally speaking, when people are presented with a range of trait information about a target individual, the traits are neither 'averaged' nor 'summed' to reach a final impression. When these traits differ in terms of their positivity and negativity, negative traits disproportionately impact the final impression. This is specifically in line with the notion of negativity dominance (see 'Explanations' above).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.