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Your brain is biased toward Negativity, which may have evolved to
help us survive. But it also can ramp up our anxiety.
May 6, 2025
Hadley’s Intro: Discover how to channel negativity
into productive action, courtesy of WashingtonPost.com
Guest Post written By Katherine Kam
Your co-worker surprised you with a chocolate chip
cookie, but a teammate took a dig at your report.
As the day goes on, you’re more likely to dwell
on the criticism than the act of kindness.
Negative events feel more psychologically intense
than positive ones, thanks to a cognitive tendency
called the negativity bias. That’s true even
when events are of equal weight.
“Very simply, bad is stronger than good. We
respond more strongly to things that could hurt or
harm us than to things that could benefit us,”
said Catherine Norris, an associate professor of
psychology and neuroscience at Swarthmore College.
Negativity bias is important to human functioning
since it helps protect us from harm. But in some
individuals, negativity bias can be correlated
with stress, depression and anxiety. There are
ways to manage negativity bias, experts said, so
that it can benefit us.
Negativity bias evolved over time
Scientists theorize that the negativity bias
evolved as a “survival-based mechanism,”
Norris said. “Survival is really the top goal of
any individual.”
“If you’re walking to get water and you
encounter a tiger, it’s a great idea to stay
focused on the tiger” and not on the pretty
sunset, said Alison Ledgerwood, a professor of
psychology at the University of California at
Davis.
That focus “generalizes to any negative
information, even when it’s not tiger-level
danger,” she said.
Nowadays, most of us don’t worry about being
eaten by wild animals but still face threats that
can feel overwhelming, researchers said.
“Many people have lost their jobs, and people
can’t access health care that they need,”
Ledgerwood said. “I would put those kinds of
things more at the level of tigers. … These are
really negative things that need our attention.”
Our brains respond more strongly to negative
stimuli
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), a type of brain scan, and other methods,
researchers have found that negative images elicit
a stronger brain response in subjects than
positive ones, Norris said in a 2021 review paper.
What’s more, negative impressions can last a lot
longer. People tend to become desensitized when
they see an image repeatedly, Norris said.
However, with negative images, “the brain stands
up and takes notice. It really starts to pay more
attention when the same negative stimulus is
repeated” over time, she said.
Studies have shown that such negative reactions
can remain stable for up to a year.
Some people have more negativity bias
Norris said that in her research, she has seen a
wide variety in the range of negativity bias from
person to person. Since the bias may be an
evolutionary adaptation, natural selection and
variations would lead to differences, she said.
Research shows that, on average, women tend to
have a stronger negativity bias, as shown by their
more intense reactions to images of mutilations,
dead bodies and other highly unpleasant subject
matter. In contrast, “males exhibit a smaller
negativity bias, possibly encouraging more
risk-taking behaviors,” Norris wrote in her
review paper.
In hunter-gatherer societies, men were expected to
venture out to explore and to protect the group,
she said. “They might need to be a little less
careful, a bit more curious,” Norris said.
Negativity bias can sometimes be useful
Negativity gets a bad rap, but it can be useful,
Ledgerwood said: “Negative feelings contain
information.”
Focusing on negative feelings can spur us to solve
problems and do things differently, said Emma
McAdam, a licensed marriage and family therapist
in Provo, Utah.
However, people with “a very high negativity
bias” are in danger of “extremely high levels
of anxiety,” Norris said.
How to manage negativity bias
It is harder for people to shift away from
negative thinking than positive thinking,
Ledgerwood said.
“Our research shows that once people think about
negative information, that way of thinking about
it tends to stick in our minds and resists
subsequent attempts to change it,” Ledgerwood
said.
Knowing about the negativity bias won’t fix
things, she said.
Instead, Ledgerwood recommends that we “channel
the negativity into some kind of productive
action.” Also, she said, try to balance — not
substitute — negativity even with simple
measures such as going for a walk.
“It’s important to do both,” she said. “If
you just lean into the information contained in
the negative and use it to motivate yourself into
action, just doing that won’t work. You’ll
burn out. So we need to also be adding some
positivity.”
Here are some research-based ways to manage
negativity bias:
Try to switch your attention to the positive.
McAdam said she often sees people mired in
negativity. “When they express the problem
they’re having, they often use language like,
‘Everything is awful, the world is worse than
it’s ever been, my marriage is a complete
disaster’,” she said.
When our brains default to the negative, we could
try to “actively shift our attention to
something else because attention is our greatest
superpower,” McAdam said.
For example, if you’re stewing over the belief
that your husband can’t do anything right
because he forgot to wheel out the trash bins,
correct your bias by remembering that he just did
the laundry, McAdam said. “We have to start
noticing it because there is good everywhere
around us. We’re often blind to that because of
our negativity bias,” she said.
Make gratitude a habit. Set a time each day to
write down a handful of things for which you are
grateful, McAdam said.
Naming what you appreciate “is helping to train
your brain in a new habit. It’s hard at first,
and then the more you do it, the easier it gets,
the more automatic it gets,” Ledgerwood said. It
“can substantially boost people’s
well-being.”
Use the negative to break bad habits. If you want
to change a bad habit — such as quitting
smoking, drinking less or cutting your sugar
intake — go negative. Norris said her research
suggests that “increasing how bad we feel in
that situation is more effective in creating
behavioral change.”
“If you focus on the fact that cigarettes are
addictive, and they smell, and they’re giving
you cancer and all of these negative consequences,
that will help you to decrease that behavior and
hopefully to end up quitting,” she said.
Connect with other people in a constructive way.
“Sometimes when we’re ruminating on negative
stuff, we get very self-focused,” Ledgerwood
said. Finding ways to help others “can be this
shortcut to breaking out of that self-focus” and
makes us feel better, she said.
On a broader scale, people can channel negative
feelings into positive action, Ledgerwood said.
“We can use them to say: ‘There’s a problem.
Who else is experiencing this problem? How can I
connect with them?’” she said.
“The action part is really important,” she
said, “for example, with anger, using it as a
motivation to do something about what feels
unfair.”
Do you have a question about human behavior or
neuroscience? Email BrainMatters@washpost.com and
we may answer it in a future column.
Will you channel a negativity bias into productive actions
to create happy, sexy love in a relationship?
Hadley Finch
And claim your gift audiobook with positive love tips
for happy relationships https://happysexyloveinromanticrelationships.com
