Why do comments and bad treatment stay with us for so long? Why does dealing with sadness take more work?
The "negative bias" in our brains makes us more likely to believe bad news. Automatic bias can be found early on in the way the brain processes information.
One example is John Cacioppo, who used to work at Ohio State and now works at Chicago. It was shown that seeing pictures of Ferraris, pizzas, crippled faces, dead cats, plates, and hair dryers can make people feel good, bad, or neutral. The electrical activity of the brain cortex, which shows how much information is being processed, was also watched.
Cacioppo says that negative events have a bigger effect on the brain. More changes happen in the electrical action. This means that bad news changes how we feel more than good news. The
To avoid harm, we might put too much value on bad events. Our main way of staying alive throughout history has been to stay away from danger. There are parts of our brains that can detect and react to danger.
This tendency is present in all areas of life because of how the brain reacts to bad events.
Not surprisingly, this tendency affects a lot of our interactions with other people. Many studies show that couples should find a balance between being negative and being positive. When two people are in a healthy relationship, the positive and negative emotions are usually balanced.
Happy couples have a good balance of good and bad thoughts and actions towards each other, which sets them apart from couples who have deep-seated marriage problems. A lot of couples fight, but they still love and want each other. These couples know that good behaviour is important.
But this is hard. As long as the bad is greater than the good, there is no need for a 50% positive-to-negative ratio.
Researchers carefully mapped out how much time couples spend fighting and how much time they spend being positive. They came to the conclusion that a certain balance of negativity and positivity is needed for both partners to enjoy being married.
The magic number is 1.5. A marriage will be more stable over time if there are five times as many good thoughts and interactions as bad ones. Divorcing couples, on the other hand, don't do anything to improve their situation.
Similar results were found by other experts in other areas of life. The number of times these small good things happen is important, from one to five. Once in a while
Even if we have a very good time, like at a birthday party, our brains still hold on to negative bias. For happiness to be heavy, small amounts of happiness must happen a lot.