Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations.

Ito, Tiffany A.; Larsen, Jeff T.; Smith, N. Kyle; Cacioppo, John T.

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.4.887

Cited by 1,311 publications

(1,103 citation statements)

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“…Carver and Vaccaro's results indicate that infants allocated greater attention to the toy associated with a negative emotion than to the toys associated with positive or neutral emotions. These results parallel the finding by Ito, Larsen et al (1998;see introduction) that adults' ERPs show enhanced activity in response to evaluatively negative as compared to positive or neutral stimuli.…”

Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingsupporting

confidence: 88%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

937

615

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There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

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Section: A Evidence From Social Referencingsupporting

confidence: 88%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

937

615

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Along this line of thought high affording tools facilitate the activation of motor schemata as indexed by the reduction in N300. Furthermore, previous electrophysiological research on esthetic evaluation which required explicit judgments (Jacobsen and Höfel, 2003) revealed that between 300 and 400 ms a fronto-central phasic negativity, more pronounced for non-beautiful patterns, may reflect a greater responsivity to negative than positive stimuli during the explicit evaluation processes (Ito et al, 1998;Jacobsen and Höfel, 2003;Höfel et al, 2007). Taking this previous evidence into account, our results suggest that both affordance and attractiveness work together to facilitate the tool recognition processes in the recoverability of the object representation when the tool is both high affording and high attractive.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

Righi

Orlando

Marzi

2014

International Journal of Psychophysiology

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This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. The relation between attractiveness and motor affordance is a key topic in design and has not yet been investigated electrophysiologically. In this respect, action affordance and attractiveness represent two crucial dimensions in object processing (specifically for tools). In light of this evidence, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) enabled us to gain new insights into the time course of the interaction between these two dimensions during an explicit tool evaluation task. Behaviorally, tools that were judged as high affording and high attractive yielded faster response times than those judged as low affording and low attractive. The ERP results showed that early processes related to sensory gating and feature extraction (N100) were sensitive to both affordance and attractiveness; the P200 was dominated by affordance, indexing a facilitated access to motor action representation. The N300, P300 and the Late Positive Potential (LPP) showed enhanced responses for highly affording/attractive tools, reflecting the interconnection between attractiveness and affordance. Later responses were entirely affected by attractiveness, suggesting additional affective responses evoked by desirable tools. We are showing that things that are perceived as more functional and attractive have a privileged neural activation in the time course of tool evaluation, for the first time.

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“…From the field of emotion research it has been theorized that slow positive waves such as the P3 and related LPPs are an index of motivational relevance (Ito et al 1998;Schupp et al 2000Schupp et al , 2006. Stimulus-related late positive peaks in the ERP reflect perceptual processing of the stimulus, which is strongly driven by motivational relevance of the stimulus (Junghöfer et al 2006).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

CLINICAL STUDY: Cocaine craving is associated with electrophysiological brain responses to cocaine‐related stimuli

et al. 2008

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Several studies show that substance dependence disorders are characterized by an enhanced processing of substancerelated stimuli. The present study was designed to examine the association between craving levels and selective processing of drug cues in cocaine-dependent patients using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). In abstinent cocaine-dependent patients and a healthy control group, we studied the late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes elicited by neutral and cocaine-related stimuli. The results show that cocaine-dependent patients have an enhanced electrophysiological response in the late LPP time window to cocaine-related stimuli as compared to controls, suggesting an enhanced processing of these stimuli. Most importantly, a robust association was observed between cocaine craving and LPP amplitude. High craving levels were associated with larger LPP amplitudes at central electrode sites in the right hemisphere. These findings are in line with theories linking motivational aspects and appetitive stimulus processing. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that ERPs are a useful index to assess motivational properties of stimuli in cocainedependent patients. These findings suggest that electrophysiological measures may have clinical relevance in substance use disorders.

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Negative information weighs more heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in evaluative categorizations.

Cited by 1,311 publications

References 43 publications

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Attractiveness and affordance shape tools neural coding: Insight from ERPs

CLINICAL STUDY: Cocaine craving is associated with electrophysiological brain responses to cocaine‐related stimuli

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