Negativity Dominance

NEGATIVITY DOMINANCE

In the experiment described here, people lying in a brain scanner saw pictures of eyes expressing fear or happiness. Each picture was shown for less than 2/100 of a second and immediately masked by “visual noise,” a random display of dark and bright squares. None of the observers ever consciously knew that he had seen pictures of eyes, but one part of their brain evidently knew: the amygdala, which has a primary role as the “threat center” of the brain, although it is also activated in other emotional states. Images of the brain showed an intense response of the amygdala to a threatening picture that the viewer did not recognize. The information about the threat probably traveled via a superfast neural channel that feeds directly into a part of the brain that processes emotions, bypassing the visual cortex that supports the conscious experience of “seeing.” The same circuit also causes schematic angry faces (a potential threat) to be processed faster and more efficiently than schematic happy faces. Some experimenters have reported that an angry face “pops out” of a crowd of happy faces, but a single happy face does not stand out in an angry crowd. The brains of humans and other animals contain a mechanism that is designed to give priority to bad news. By shaving a few hundredths of a second from the time needed to detect a predator, this circuit improves the animal’s odds of living long enough to reproduce. The automatic operations of System 1 reflect this evolutionary history. No comparably rapid mechanism for recognizing good news has been detected. Of course, we and our animal cousins are quickly alerted to signs of opportunities to mate or to feed, and advertisers design billboards accordingly. Still, threats are privileged above opportunities, as they should be.

The brain responds quickly even to purely symbolic threats. Emotionally loaded words quickly attract attention, and bad words (war, crime) attract attention faster than do happy words (peace, love). There is no real threat, but the mere reminder of a bad event is treated in System 1 as threatening. With a word such as vomit, the symbolic representation associatively evokes in attenuated form many of the reactions to the real thing, including physiological indices of emotion and even fractional tendencies to avoid or approach, recoil or lean forward. The sensitivity to threats extends to the processing of statements of opinions with which we strongly disagree. For example, depending on your attitude to euthanasia, it would take your brain less than one-quarter of a second to register the “threat” in a sentence that starts with “I think euthanasia is an acceptable/unacceptable …”

The psychologist Paul Rozin, an expert on disgust, observed that a single cockroach will completely wreck the appeal of a bowl of cherries, but a cherry will do nothing at all for a bowl of cockroaches. As he points out, the negative trumps the positive in many ways, and loss aversion is one of many manifestations of a broad negativity dominance. Other scholars, in a paper titled “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” summarized the evidence as follows: “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.” They cite John Gottman, the well-known expert in marital relations, who observed that the long-term success of a relationship depends far more on avoiding the negative than on seeking the positive. Gottman estimated that a stable relationship requires that good interactions outnumber bad interactions by at least 5 to 1. Other asymmetries in the social domain are even more striking. We all know that a friendship that may take years to develop can be ruined by a single action.

Some distinctions between good and bad are hardwired into our biology. Infants enter the world ready to respond to pain as bad and to sweet (up to a point) as good. In many situations, however, the boundary between good and bad is a reference point that changes over time and depends on the immediate circumstances. Imagine that you are out in the country on a cold night, inadequately dressed for the torrential rain, your clothes soaked. A stinging cold wind completes your misery. As you wander around, you find a large rock that provides some shelter from the fury of the elements. The biologist Michel Cabanac would call the experience of that moment intensely pleasurable because it functions, as pleasure normally does, to indicate the direction of a biologically significant improvement of circumstances. The pleasant relief will not last very long, of course, and you will soon be shivering behind the rock again, driven by your renewed suffering to seek better shelter.