Negative information tends to influence evaluations more strongly than comparably extreme positive information. To test whether this negativity bias operates at the evaluative categorization stage, the authors recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which are more sensitive to the evaluative categorization than the response output stage, as participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral pictures. Results revealed larger amplitude late positive brain potentials during the evaluative categorization of (a) positive and negative stimuli as compared with neutral stimuli and (b) negative as compared with positive stimuli, even though both were equally probable, evaluatively extreme, and arousing. These results provide support for the hypothesis that the negativity bias in affective processing occurs as early as the initial categorization into valence classes.
Research has demonstrated that people automatically devote more attention to negative information than to positive information. The authors conducted 3 experiments to test whether this bias is attenuated by a person's affective context. Specifically, the authors primed participants with positive and negative information using traditional (e.g., subliminal semantic priming) and nontraditional (e.g., social interactions) means and measured the amount of attention they allocated to positive and negative information. With both event-related brain potentials (Experiment 1) and the Stroop task (Experiments 2 and 3), results suggest that the attention bias to negative information is attenuated or eliminated when positive constructs are made accessible. The implications of this result for other biases to negative information and for the self-reinforcing nature of emotional disorders are discussed.
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