Negativity Bias

Negativity bias refers to the tendency for individuals to disproportionately focus on and remember negative events, thoughts, and emotions, while downplaying or disregarding positive experiences. This leads to a skewed perception of reality and the creation of a Negative Feedback Loop into depressive states. Negativity bias is a hall mark feature of clinical depression.

This tendency to see the negative is thought to be an evolved feature of the human brain. The species that went going through the Ice Ages had been bred, and selected, through pessimism. The mentality that said, “It’s a beautiful day in San Diego today, I bet it’ll be beautiful tomorrow” got crushed by the ice. What got selected for, in the Ice Ages, was bad weather animals, who were always thinking about the bad stuff that could occur. So what comes naturally to people is pessimism.