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Whilst conducting research into the brain, an interesting discovery is worth sharing.
Negativity bias of the brain

Have you ever found yourself dwelling on an insult or fixating on your mistakes? Criticisms often
have a greater impact than compliments, and bad news frequently draws more attention than
good. The reason for this is that negative events have a greater impact on our brains than
positive ones. Psychologists refer to this as the negative bias (also called the negativity bias),
and it can have a powerful effect on your behaviour, your decisions, and even your
relationships.

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 behaviour 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.

The simplest example is how the loss of £20 feels so much more painful than the equivalent joy of
finding £20, Apparently this is now proven about the human brain. That the negative thoughts
will be effectively double the positive ones. The individual ability to reverse the effect in our mind
is down to our tendency toward positive or negative thinking and actions.

If we receive a compliment from someone then a criticism from someone else, the two don’t
neutralise each other, we feel twice as bad about the criticism as we feel good about the
compliment, the criticism would definitely leave a stronger emotional mark. It’s how well we
cope with reversing the effect that counts and this is done by positive action like vocalising
appreciation, rather than mere positive thinking.
Apparently it’s the way our brains are hard wired to expect negativity. This formation of a
negative mental bias in the brain dates back to the cave man days when we needed to be
prepared for attack or threat. But these are out of date mental hang ups obstructing our path to
happiness and only action like active appreciation overturns it. This historic inherited anxiety
goes back to Neanderthal man and yet we still struggle with it today.

Understanding it when it crops up in our minds helps us to take a positive stance against it and
take positive action like active appreciation to say ‘Stuff you anxiety, you ’aint spoiling my hap-
py state’. Dr Sandy Mann, a recognised professional expert in the field of human psychology at
the University of Central Lancashire touched on this in a podcast session with the lecturer Steve
Bennett. Sandi described the process of identifying negative thoughts as they occur as ‘thought
and emotion catching’ whereby once identified, the negative thought can be replaced by
repetition with a stronger more positive one.

The negative bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to
dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means
that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise.