Voluntary pursuit of negatively valenced stimuli from childhood to early adulthood

Abstract

Although common sense suggests that we are motivated to pursue positive and avoid negative experiences, previous research shows that people regularly seek out negative experiences. In the current study, we characterized this tendency from childhood to young adulthood. Due to the known increases in risky behavior and sensation seeking in adolescence, we hypothesized that adolescents would show an increased engagement with negatively valenced stimuli compared to children and adults. Participants aged 4–25 (N = 192) completed a behavioral task assessing motivation to engage with negative, positive, and neutral images. On each trial, participants viewed two small images and selected one to view at a larger size for up to 10s. Trials were organized into three valence conditions: negative versus positive images (matched on arousal), negative versus neutral images, and positive versus neutral images. Although participants chose positive images more than neutral or negative images, participants selected negative images frequently, even when given a positive (28% of trials) or neutral (42% of trials) alternative. Contrary to expectations, the tendency to choose negative images was highest in early childhood and decreased linearly with increasing age, and the tendency to choose positive images increased linearly with age. These results provide insight into how motivation to engage with emotional stimuli varies across age. It is possible that the novelty and rarity of negative experiences drives children to pursue these stimuli. Alternatively, children may find negative images less aversive, which would caution against assuming that these stimuli elicit the same motivational states in individuals of all ages.

The representation of emotion knowledge across development

“…Even 3-year-olds used negativity to guide their sorting behaviors, although this result should be interpreted cautiously given how this age group approached the practice sort (see Section 1 of Supporting Information ). Our findings of an early role for negativity in children’s emerging emotion knowledge is consistent with reports that young children display greater knowledge of negative emotions ( Lagattuta & Wellman, 2001 ), attend more to negative faces ( Lagattuta & Kramer, 2017 ), engage in greater discussion of negative emotions ( Lagattuta & Wellman, 2002 ), and voluntarily explore negatively valenced stimuli ( Grisanzio et al, 2021 ).…”

Deciphering morbid curiosity: Psychological mechanisms underlying the voluntary viewing of negative images

“…The results showed that people were sometimes motivated to see negative stimuli over positive stimuli and chose to see a negative image with moderate probability. These findings have also been observed in children (Grisanzio et al, 2021).…”

Emotion word production tasks grant insight into the development of emotion word organization and accessibility

“…This needn't occur out of necessity, as the proportion of negative or positive words that people know or can rapidly generate could vary for different age groups (e.g., children could know many more negative than positive or neutral words, and this proportion could shrink with age). In fact, we considered alternative hypotheses whereby (i) children show heightened access to negative words due to their willingness to approach normatively "negative" stimuli (Grisanzio et al, 2020) and (ii) adolescents show an elevated negative valence bias due to normative peaks in risk for psychopathology and contrahedonic motivation in this developmental stage (Riedeger et al, 2009;Fairchild et al, 2011;McGrath et al, 2023). However, our findings did not support either alternative hypothesis and instead suggest that youth and adults are sampling from negative and positive words in similar proportions.…”

“…A likely explanation of this observation is that English has more negative emotion words than positive or neutral words (Jackson et al, 2021), although it may also be related to the classic literature showing that people typically attend more to negative than positive information (Rozin & Royzman, 2001). From a developmental perspective, negative valence bias may be especially elevated in childhood and decrease linearly across age, as prior research shows that children tend to seek out and attend to negative information more than other age groups (Grisanzio et al, 2020). Alternatively, the relationship between age and negative valence bias could be quadratic, such that negative valence bias peaks in adolescence, as is found for other clinical and affective processes that involve elevated focus on negative affect (e.g., risk of psychopathology ;Fairchild et al, 2011;McGrath et al, 2023;and contrahedonic motivation;Riediger et al, 2009).…”