<<

Review of General Copyright 2001 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 2001. Vol. 5. No. 4. 323-370 1089-2680/O1/S5.O0 DOI: 10.1037//1089-2680.5.4.323

Bad Is Stronger Than

Roy F. Baumeister and Ellen Bratslavsky Catrin Finkenauer Case Western Reserve University Free University of Amsterdam

Kathleen D. Vohs Case Western Reserve University

The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interper- sonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad , bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and sa- lience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general across a broad range of psychological phenomena.

Centuries of literary efforts and religious pothesis that bad is stronger than good (see also thought have depicted human life in terms of a Rozin & Royzman, in press). That is, events struggle between good and bad forces. At the that are negatively valenced (e.g., losing metaphysical level, gods or are the money, being abandoned by friends, and receiv- opponents of the divine forces of creation and ing criticism) will have a greater impact on the harmony. At the individual level, temptation individual than positively valenced events of and destructive instincts battle against strivings the same type (e.g., winning money, gaining for , , and fulfillment. "Good" and friends, and receiving praise). This is not to say "bad" are among the first words and concepts that bad will always triumph over good, spelling learned by children (and even by house pets), doom and misery for the human race. Rather, and most people can readily characterize almost good may prevail over bad by superior force of any experience, , or outcome as good or numbers: Many good events can overcome the bad. psychological effects of a single bad one. When What form does this eternal conflict take in equal measures of good and bad are present, psychology? The purpose of this article is to however, the psychological effects of bad ones review evidence pertaining to the general hy- outweigh those of the good ones. This may in fact be a general principle or law of psycholog- ical phenomena, possibly reflecting the innate Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, and Kathleen D. predispositions of the psyche or at least reflect- Vohs, Department of Psychology, Case Western Reserve ing the almost inevitable adaptation of each University; Catrin Finkenauer, Department of Psychology, Free University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. individual to the exigencies of daily life. Ellen Bratslavsky in now at the Department of Psychol- This pattern has already been recognized in ogy, Ohio State University. certain research domains. This is probably most We thank the many people who have contributed helpful true in the field of , in comments and references. This work is dedicated to the of Warren. which the positive-negative asymmetry effect Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- has been repeatedly confirmed (e.g., Anderson, dressed to Roy F. Baumeister or Kathleen D. Vohs, Depart- 1965; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990; Skowronski ment of Psychology, Case Western Reserve University, & Carlston, 1989). In general, and apart from a 10900 Euclid Avenue, , Ohio 44106-7123. Elec- tronic mail may be sent to either [email protected] or few carefully crafted exceptions, negative infor- [email protected]. mation receives more processing and contrib-

323 324 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS utes more strongly to the final impression than efforts on understanding the bad rather than the does positive information. Learning something good. bad about a new acquaintance carries more Why has this been so? Undoubtedly, one weight than learning something good, by and hypothesis might be that psychologists are pes- large. simistic misanthropes or sadists who derive per- In other spheres, the effect seems present but verse satisfaction from studying human suffer- not recognized. For example, nearly every psy- ing and failure. An alternative explanation, chology textbook teaches that propinquity however, would be that psychology has con- breeds attraction. This conclusion is based on sisted of young researchers trying to obtain pub- the landmark study by Festinger, Schachter, and lishable findings in a relatively new that Back (1950) in which the formation of friend- was characterized by weak measures and high ships in a married students' dormitory was variance. They needed to study the strongest tracked over time. Contrary to elaborate hypoth- possible effects in order for the truth to shine eses about similarity, role complementarity, through the gloom of error variance and to values, and other factors, the strongest predictor register on their measures. If bad is stronger of who became friends was physical propin- than good, then early psychologists would in- quity: Participants who lived closest to each evitably gravitate toward studying the negative other were most likely to become friends. and troubled side of human life, whereas the Yet a lesser known follow-up by Ebbesen, more positive phenomena had to wait until the Kjos, and Konecni (1976) found that propin- recent emergence of stronger methods, more quity predicted the formation of disliking even sensitive measures, and better statistical more strongly than liking. Living near one an- techniques. other increased the likelihood that two people The goal of this review is to draw together the would become enemies even more strongly than asymmetrical effects of bad and good across a it predicted the likelihood that they would be- deliberately broad range of phenomena. Even in come friends. Propinquity thus does not cause topic areas in which this asymmetry has been liking. More probably, it simply amplifies the recognized (as in impression formation), re- effect of other variables and events. Because searchers have not generally linked it to patterns bad events are stronger than good ones, an in other topic areas and may therefore have identical increase in propinquity produces more overlooked the full extent of its generality. The enemies than friends. present investigation is intended to provide The relative strength of bad may also be some perspective on just how broadly valid it is relevant to the topics studied by research psy- that bad is stronger than good. We certainly do chologists. As president of the American Psy- not intend to claim that the greater power of bad chological Association, Martin Seligman (1999) things overrides all other of psychol- called for a "" movement to ogy. Other relevant phenomena may include offset the negative focus that he saw as domi- congruency effects (good goes with good; bad nating most of psychology's history. The nega- goes with bad) and self-aggrandizing patterns tive focus was first documented by Carlson's (bad can be avoided or transformed into good). (1966) survey of psychology textbooks, in Nevertheless, the general principle that bad is which he found twice as many chapters (121 vs. stronger than good may have important impli- 52) devoted to unpleasant as to pleasant emo- cations for human psychology and behavior. tions, and a similar imbalance was found in Definition implies rendering one concept in lines of coverage and use of specific words. terms of others, and the most fundamental ones More recently, Czapinski (1985) coded more therefore will resist satisfactory definition. than 17,000 research articles in psychology Good, bad, and strength are among the most journals and found that the coverage of negative universal and fundamental terms (e.g., Cassirer, issues and phenomena exceeded positive, good 1955; Osgood & Tzeng, 1990), and it could be ones 69% to 31%, a that was fairly strong argued that they refer to concepts that are un- across all areas of psychology (although weak- derstood even by creatures with minimal lin- est in social psychology). Seligman is probably guistic capacity (such as small children and quite right in proposing that psychologists have even animals). By good we understand desir- focused most of their theoretical and empirical able, beneficial, or pleasant outcomes including BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 325 states or consequences. Bad is the opposite: pothesis that bad is stronger than good. To undesirable, harmful, or unpleasant. Strength establish the breadth of the pattern, we try to refers to the causal impact. To say that bad is identify many seemingly different and diverse stronger than good is thus to say that bad things spheres in which bad is stronger than good. will produce larger, more consistent, more mul- Given the breadth of the hypothesis, it is prob- tifaceted, or more lasting effects than good ably not possible to cover every study that has things. ever found bad to be stronger than good in any sphere. We have, however, tried to cover as much as possible and to provide evidence for A Brief Discussion: Why Should Bad Be the effect in as many different spheres as pos- Stronger Than Good? sible. How did we accomplish this? Unlike more focused narrative reviews or meta-analy- Offering an explanation for the greater power ses, we were unable to conduct a systematic of bad than good is likely to be an inherently search using keywords such as good or bad. difficult enterprise. The very generality of the Instead, we made an effort to cast as broad a net pattern entails that there are likely to be few as possible and then focus our search on several principles that are even more broad and general. research areas. As part of this process, we made Meanwhile, researchers will have found lower a request via e-mail to the members of the level explanations that help explain why bad Society for Personality and Social Psychology may be stronger than good with regard to spe- list-serve. The roughly 100 responses received cific, narrowly defined phenomena. from these members served as a starting point From our perspective, it is evolutionarily for our search. After dividing our review into adaptive for bad to be stronger than good. We several topic areas, we then out to uncover believe that throughout our evolutionary his- those studies that compared the relative strength tory, organisms that were better attuned to bad of good and bad effects, especially those that things would have been more likely to survive also included a neutral control group. threats and, consequently, would have increased The central goal of this review is to establish probability of passing along their genes. As an convergence across multiple areas. The consis- example, consider the implications of foregoing tency of conclusions across each area is more options or ignoring certain possible outcomes. important than the robustness or methodologi- A person who ignores the possibility of a pos- cal strength of evidence in each specific area. itive outcome may later experience significant We attempt to do to each area, but our at having missed an opportunity for plea- emphasis is on breadth (and on the quest for any sure or advancement, but nothing directly terri- patterns in the opposite direction), so it seemed ble is likely to result. In contrast, a person who desirable to cover as many different areas as ignores danger (the possibility of a bad out- possible. come) even once may end up maimed or dead. Survival requires urgent to possible bad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard to Reacting to Events good ones. Hence, it would be adaptive to be psychologically designed to respond to bad All contain both good and bad events. If more strongly than good. After we review the bad is stronger than good, then the bad events evidence for the phenomenon of bad being will have longer lasting and more intense con- stronger than good, we present a more complete sequences than good events. In particular, the discussion of the theoretical for the effects of good events should dissipate more strength of bad over good and also review other rapidly than the effects of bad events. This theories that have been proposed in the context should occur despite the mechanisms described of specific subareas (e.g., impression formation). by Taylor (1991), by which many people strive to minimize bad events and distance themselves from them, although those minimizing pro- Evidence cesses should limit the impact of bad events and possibly produce some contrary findings. The purpose of the following sections is to A widely accepted account of the impact of review evidence pertaining to the central hy- life events was put forward by Helson (1964) 326 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS and called adaptation level theory. In this view, and instead return people to their baseline. After the impact of substantial changes in life circum- a short peak in , people become ac- stances is temporary. People (and animals) react customed to the new situation and are no more more to changes than to stable conditions, so happy than they were before the improvement. they are most sensitive to new conditions. After a serious misfortune, however, people ad- Change, therefore, produces strong reactions, just less quickly, even though many victims but the circumstances that result from the ultimately do recover (Taylor, 1983). change gradually cease to elicit a reaction and Comparison of unanticipated financial out- eventually become taken for granted. Applying comes can equate the objective magnitude of this theory to human happiness, Brickman and events. Kahneman and Tversky (1984) had par- Campbell (1971) postulated a "hedonic tread- ticipants perform thought experiments in which mill" by which long-term happiness will remain they either gained or lost the same amount of roughly constant regardless of what happens money. The distress participants reported over because the impact of both good and bad events losing some money was greater than the or will wear off over time. happiness that accompanied gaining the same In testing the , however, it amount of money. Put another way, you are emerged that bad events wear off more slowly more upset about losing $50 than you are happy than good events. Brickman, Coates, and about gaining $50. Janoff-Bulman (1978) interviewed three groups In a prospective study of in pregnant of respondents: people who had won a lottery, women, Wells, Hobfoll, and Lavin (1999) ex- people who had been paralyzed in an accident, amined gains and losses of resources early in and people who had not recently experienced pregnancy and measured postpartum outcomes any such major life event. The lottery wins and including and . Gains in re- accidents had occurred about 1 year before the sources had no significant effects, but losses interview. Confirming the hypothesis for posi- produced significant effects on postpartum an- tive events, the lottery winners did not report ger (even after controlling for anger at the time greater happiness than the two other groups. of initial measurement, which included anger at Brickman et al. proposed that this result was the loss of resources). Wells et al. also found due to habituation, as the adaptation level phe- that effects of subsequent losses of resources nomenon would predict: The over the were significantly higher among women who lottery win did not last, and the winners' hap- had experienced the previous losses; whereas if piness levels quickly returned to what they had they had not had the initial loss, the effect of the been before the lottery win. Ironically, perhaps, later loss was muted. These findings point to a the only lasting effect of winning the lottery snowballing effect of consecutive bad out- appeared to be the bad ones, such as a reduction comes. Good outcomes did not produce any in enjoyment of ordinary . such effects. In contrast to the transitory euphoria of good Developmental and clinical observations fortune, the accident victims were much slower likewise suggest that single bad events are far to adapt to their fate, Brickman et al. (1978) stronger than even the strongest good ones. Var- found. They rated themselves as significantly ious studies reveal long-term harmful conse- less happy than participants in the control con- quences of child abuse or sexual abuse, includ- dition. The victims continued to compare their ing depression, relationship problems, revictim- current situation with how their lives had been ization, and sexual dysfunction, even if the before the accident (unlike lottery winners, who abuse occurred only once or twice (Cahill, did not seem to spend much time thinking how Llewelyn, & Pearson, 1991; Fleming, Mullen, their lives had improved from the bygone days Sibthorpe, & Bammer, 1999; Silver, Boon, & of relative ). Brickman et al. called this Stones, 1983; Styron & Janoff-Bulman, 1997; phenomenon the " effect" (p. 921). Weiss, Longhurst, & Mazure, 1999). These ef- The seeming implication of these findings is fects seem more durable than any comparable that adaptation-level effects are asymmetrical, positive aspect of childhood, and it also seems consistent with the view that bad is stronger doubtful (although difficult to prove) that a - than good. Adaptation-level effects tend to pre- gle positive event could offset the harm caused vent any lasting changes in overall happiness by a single episode of violent or sexual abuse; BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 327 whereas the single negative event can probably ment, and depressogenic about the undo the benefits of many positive interactions. , the self, and life in general. Sexuality offers a sphere in which relevant How long the impact of everyday events lasts comparisons can perhaps be made, insofar as was studied by Sheldon, Ryan, and Reis (1996). good sexual experiences are often regarded as Bad events had longer lasting effects. In their among the best and most intense positive expe- data, having a good day did not have any no- riences people have. Ample evidence suggests ticeable effect on a person's well-being the fol- that a single bad experience in the sexual do- lowing day, whereas having a bad day did carry main can impair sexual functioning and enjoy- over and influence the next day. Specifically, ment and even have deleterious effects on after a bad day, participants were likely to have health and well-being for years afterward (see lower well-being on the next day. Although the Laumann, Gagon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994; results are technically correlational, something Laumann, Paik, & Rosen, 1999; Rynd, 1988; must cause them, whether it is the bad day itself note, however, that these are correlational find- causing the subsequent bad day or some other ings and some interpretive questions remain). cause producing the consecutive pair of bad There is no indication that any good sexual days. Either way, the bad has stronger power experience, no matter how good, can produce than good because only the bad reliably pro- duced consecutive bad days. benefits in which magnitude is comparable to the harm caused by such victimization. Even at the sensory level, bad events seem to produce stronger reactions than good ones. Ex- Turning from major experiences to everyday pressive reactions to unpleasant, pleasant, and actions, we find the same pattern of greater neutral odors were examined by Gilbert, Frid- power for the unpleasant than the pleasant lund, and Sabini (1987). Participants smelled events. A diary study by David, Green, Martin, various odors while alone, and their facial ex- and Suls (1997) examined the effects of every- pressions were videotaped. Raters then watched day good and bad events, as well as personality the tapes and tried to infer the odor from the traits. Undesirable (bad) events had more per- facial reaction. Unpleasant odors were most ac- vasive effects on subsequent than desir- curately classified, partly because more facial able (good) ones. Although each type of event movement was perceived in the unpleasant odor influenced the relevant mood (i.e., bad events trials. Pleasant odors elicited more facial move- influenced bad mood, and good events predicted ment than neutral odors, but the neutral ones good mood) to similar degrees, bad events had were still rated more accurately than the posi- an additional effect on the opposite-valence tive ones. Thus, responses to unpleasant odors mood that was lacking for good events. In other were apparently stronger, at least to the extent words, bad events influenced both good and bad that they could be accurately recognized by moods, whereas good events influenced only raters. good moods. Similar findings emerged when Perhaps the broadest manifestation of the David et al. compared (associated greater power of bad events than good to elicit with distress and negativity) and extraversion lasting reactions is contained in the psychology (associated with positivity). Neuroticism influ- of trauma. The very concept of trauma has enced both good and bad moods, whereas ex- proven broadly useful, and psychologists have traversion affected only good moods. found it helpful in many different domains. Further evidence of the greater power of bad Many kinds of traumas produce severe and last- events emerged from a 3-week longitudinal ing effects on behavior, but there is no corre- study by Nezlek and Gable (1999). Their par- sponding concept of a positive event that can ticipants furnished multiple measures of adjust- have similarly strong and lasting effects. In a ment each day, as well as recording daily sense, trauma has no true opposite concept. A events. Bad events had stronger effects on ad- single traumatic experience can have long-term justment than good events on an everyday basis. effects on the person's health, well-being, atti- The superior strength of bad events was consis- tudes, self-esteem, , and behavior; many tent across their full range of measures of ad- such effects have been documented. In contrast, justment, including self-esteem, anxiety, causal there is little evidence that single positive expe- uncertainty, perceived control over the environ- riences can have equally influential conse- 328 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS quences. It is possible that such events have effects of the bad characteristics will exert more simply eluded psychological study, but it seems influence over the relationship outcome than the more likely that the lack of an opposite concept beneficial effects of the good characteristics. for trauma indicates the greater power of bad People commonly believe that positivity of than good single events to people. communication (as opposed to negativity) is Although the findings from Brickman et al. associated with high relational satisfaction (e.g., (1978) and others reviewed in this section pro- friendships, marriages, partnerships, and fami- vide vivid and well-known indications that bad lies). In general, research findings are consistent events produce stronger, more lasting reactions with this assumption. People satisfied with their than good ones, some of the studies suffer from relationships communicate with more positive a possible asymmetry in the objective magni- verbal behaviors (e.g., agreement, confirmation, tude of the event. There is no way to ascertain constructive problem solving, politeness, ex- objectively that winning a lottery is comparable pressing ) and nonverbal behaviors in magnitude to becoming paralyzed by an ac- (e.g., smiling, head nodding, caring, or con- cident. The diary studies have the advantage of cerned voice; for more detailed descriptions of having used all the events of the day, so these these behaviors, see Gottman, 1979; Riskin & are methodologically more useful. Most con- Faunce, 1970; Rusbult, Johnson, & Morrow, vincing are the studies that attempted to ensure 1986; Stafford & Canary, 1991; Ting-Toomey, equal objective magnitudes (such as when peo- 1983; Wills, Weiss, & Patterson, 1974). On the ple gain vs. lose the same amount of money) contrary, people dissatisfied with their relation- because these permit the firmest conclusions ships communicate with more negative verbal that bad events produce stronger reactions. behaviors (e.g., , threats, or criticisms) Therefore, throughout the rest of this review, we and nonverbal behaviors (e.g., frowning or emphasize studies that either did manage to speaking in a cold hard voice). equate the good and the bad events in terms of More important, however, positive and neg- their objective magnitude or that took some ative communication have different impacts on broad, representative or exhaustive sample of relational satisfaction, and the negative are events. more decisive. To show this, John Gottman and In summary, most findings indicate that peo- his colleagues (Gottman, 1979, 1994) video- ple react more strongly to bad than good events. taped married couples in the laboratory and at The evidence covers everything from minor ev- home as they talked about a wide variety of eryday events and brief experimental exposure topics such as how their day went, the nutri- to aversive odors to major life events and trau- tional of certain foods, marital problems mas. Bad events produce more emotion, have in general, and specific conflicts in their rela- bigger effects on adjustment measures, and tionship. They then coded the couple's behav- have longer lasting effects. iors in categories (e.g., verbal, nonverbal, pos- itive, and negative). The findings indicated that Close Relationships the presence or absence of negative behaviors was more strongly related to the quality of cou- One of the central tasks and goals of human ples' relationships than the presence or absence life is to sustain a network of close relationships of positive behaviors. Positivity and negativity characterized by mutual caring and pleasant, were independent, in the sense that increasing supportive interactions (e.g., Baumeister & one did not necessarily decrease the other. The Leary, 1995). Unfortunately, many relation- important implication is that increasing positive ships fail to last, and others are sometimes less behaviors in a relationship will not affect the than satisfactory. In this section, we review relationship as much as decreasing negative be- evidence about good versus bad patterns that haviors. In another study in which videotaped contribute to the long-term relationship out- marital interactions were used, Gottman and comes. Obviously, one would expect that bad, Krokoff (1989) found that negative interactions destructive characteristics of the relationship predicted marital satisfaction more strongly will hasten its demise; whereas good, construc- than positive interactions. tive ones will preserve it. The relevant predic- The effects of emotional interactions on tion goes beyond that, however: The harmful changes in relationship satisfaction were exam- BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 329 ined by Gottman and Levenson (1986; Leven- Gottman's (1985) conclusion that reciprocity of son & Gottman, 1983, 1985). They made vid- bad responses is an especially potent predictor eotapes of couples interacting, then showed the of relationship outcomes (and is stronger than interaction tapes to the individuals and obtained reciprocity of good responses). The implication ongoing ratings of affect through the interac- is that the long-term success of a relationship tion. Of particular were data on reci- depends more on not doing bad things than on procity, defined in terms of one person express- doing good things. ing a similar emotion or change in emotion right A similar conclusion emerged from a recent after the partner had indicated similar . longitudinal study by Huston, Caughlin, Houts, Reciprocity of negative affect was especially Smith, and George (2001). By following cou- potent and in particular was more influential ples for more than a decade, they were able to than reciprocity of positive affect. The greater ascertain what features of early marital relation- influence of negative affect reciprocity was ships predicted divorce (and other unhappi- found with regard to differentiating happy ver- ness) 10 to 12 years later. Huston et al. found sus distressed marriages (Levenson & Gottman, that levels of negativity and distress early in the 1983). In a longitudinal follow-up 2 years later, marriage were higher among the later divorcing the couples who had initially shown higher rates couples than among the happily married ones. of negative affect reciprocity reported greater Positive relations during the early years of mar- declines in relationship satisfaction, whereas riage, including and affectional communi- reciprocity of positive affect had no significant cation, did not differ significantly between the effect (Levenson & Gottman, 1985). In sum- ones who ended up divorcing and those who mary, relationships are most affected by pat- ended up happily married. Without random as- terns in which one person responds negatively signment to early marital conflict (a technical to the other's negative act or . and ethical impossibility), it is difficult to draw On the basis of these results, Gottman (1994) a firm causal inference from these data. It also has proposed a revealing diagnostic index for remains possible that the early distress reflected evaluating relationships: He proposed that in some underlying conflict or even personality order for a relationship to succeed, positive and problem among the later divorcing spouses, but good interactions must outnumber the negative even that conclusion would fit the view that bad and bad ones by at least five to one. If the ratio is stronger than good. falls below that, the relationship is likely to fail Even stronger results emerged from a 2-year and breakup. This index converges well with longitudinal study by Huston and Vangelisti the thrust of our argument: Bad events are so (1991). They measured three types of socio- much stronger than good ones that the good emotionally expressive behavior among newly- must outnumber the bad in order to prevail. wed couples: affectionate communication, sex- Gottman's index suggests that bad events are on ual interest, and negativity. Sexual had average five times as powerful as good ones, at no relation to marital satisfaction, and giving or least with regard to close relationships. receiving affection had only weak and inconsis- Constructive and destructive problem-solv- tent relationships to satisfaction. In contrast, ing behavior patterns for relationships were negativity had strong and consistent links to studied by Rusbult et al. (1986; see also Rusbult global marital satisfaction. Thus, people's sat- & Zembrodt, 1983). They were able to classify isfaction with their marriage depended much couples as to the degree to which they used more heavily on the bad parts (negativity) than constructive and destructive approaches to on the good parts (affection and sex). problems, and these were assessed indepen- In support of this idea, sexual dysfunction dently so that a given couple might use both, was found to have a greater effect on the marital either, or none. In a longitudinal design, Rusbult bond than good sexual functioning. McCarthy et al. showed that the destructive patterns were (1999) reported that when sexuality functions more predictive of relationship outcomes than well within a marriage, it accounts for 15-20% constructive ones were. In particular, destruc- of the variance in the marital bond, but when tive responses to the partner's destructive re- sex functioning is bad or nonexistent (which sponses showed a greatly increased predictive most married couples would consider a bad power. This finding confirms Levenson and state), it accounts for 50-75% of the variance. 330 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

The power of bad sexual experiences, then, far resources). Thus, negativity and stress added outweighs the benefits of good sexual experi- more than 20% to the amount of variance in ences within a marriage. marital satisfaction that was explained, whereas One factor that may contribute to some of positive support and resources added only 5%. these effects is that destructive behaviors are All in all, the evidence is fairly clear and understood better than constructive ones. unanimous in indicating that relationships are Acitelli, Douvan, and Veroff (1993) found that more affected by bad events than good ones. As during the early years of marriage, couples per- seen in daily interactions, broad patterns, affect ceived and understood each other's destructive of problem solving, and marital communica- behaviors better than the constructive ones. tion, bad events have stronger effects than good Acitelli et al. interpreted this as based on the events. Reciprocation of bad responses appears greater visibility and recall of bad, destructive to be especially powerful for leading to deteri- behaviors. As Kellermann (1984) has noted, oration and breakup of close relationships. however, such explanations are not theoretically complete because they fail to say why bad Other Relationships and Interactions events are more readily noticed and recalled. Daily reports of spousal behaviors and mari- Although close relationships have received tal satisfaction were made for 2 weeks by par- the greatest amount of study, there is also some ticipants in a study by Wills et al. (1974). Of the relevant information regarding not-so-close re- amount of variance (in marital satisfaction) that lationships and other forms of interpersonal in- the predictor variables were able to explain in teraction. We report several such studies here, regression analyses, the majority (65%) was although the research on formation of initial captured by the aversive, displeasurable behav- impressions is covered in a separate section iors. This was significantly greater than the later in the article. amount explained by supportive, pleasurable Sociometric studies have examined how in- behaviors (25%). This was true despite the fact dividuals perceive each other within established that there were about three times as many pos- groups or social networks. If bad is stronger itive behaviors as aversive ones. The greater than good, then dislike and power of the bad behaviors had to overcome should be more pronounced, which would be their lesser number in order to produce a stron- reflected in higher agreement throughout the ger effect. social network. A meta-analysis of sociometric Reciprocation patterns were also examined studies of children recently confirmed this con- by Wills et al. (1974). Interspouse correlations clusion (Newcomb, Bukowski, & Pattee, 1993). indicated that negative, displeasurable behav- In particular, the two social extremes were rep- iors were reciprocated to a significant degree, resented by the highly popular children and the whereas the reciprocation of positive, pleasur- rejected children, and these were about the same able behaviors was weaker and not significant. proportions (9% and 12% of the groups, respec- This is an important step toward explaining the tively, on average). Consistency of reports greater power of bad events to affect relation- across the children, as well as for self-reports ship outcomes: The couples' subsequent inter- and for ratings by teachers and parents, was actions are apparently more directly and consis- higher for the rejected than for the popular tently affected by bad than good behaviors. As children. In other words, all perspectives agree with the daily events reviewed in the preceding more about who is rejected than about who is section, couple interactions continue to be af- popular. fected by bad more than good. Another approach to the same problem is to The relative contributions of stress (negative examine the link between naming someone as factors), social support (positive), and resources "best friend" or "worst enemy" and overall rat- (positive) to the quality of family life were ings of ability. An ambitious study by French, assessed in an extensive telephone survey by Waas, and Tarver-Behring (1986) obtained ex- Pittman and Lloyd (1988). Both marital satis- tensive sociometric data from 250 third- and faction and parental satisfaction were more fourth-grade children. All children listed their strongly affected by the bad events (i.e., the three most and least desired friends, as well as stresses) than by the positive (i.e., support and listing the three best and worst peers at sports BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 331 and at schoolwork. All children then rated ev- started off with the cooperative move. Partici- eryone in their class in terms of friendship, pants also rated the bad opponent as stronger sports, and schoolwork. The proportion of vari- than they themselves were, unlike the coopera- ance shared by the two methods was consis- tive opponent. tently higher for the bad than for the good; that In fact, when Baumeister and Leary (1995) is, low ratings led to more frequent nominations reviewed the evidence in support of a need to as "undesirable friend," "bad at sports," and belong, they concluded that that need was for "bad at schoolwork" more reliably than high nonnegative interactions, rather than positive ratings led to more frequent nominations as ones as they had originally theorized. The rea- "desirable friend," "good at sports," and "good son was that neutral interactions seemed ade- at school." quate to satisfy the need to belong in many Undoubtedly the initial acts in an interaction cases. This too confirms the greater power of create expectancies and set the tone for further bad: The effects of positive, good interactions ones, and if subsequent acts differ, the expect- were not consistently different from the effects ancies are violated. The impact of these was of neutral interactions, whereas bad ones were assessed by Afifi and Burgoon (2000), who had clearly different from the neutral. participants observe a videotaped interaction. Their research design included changes from Emotion initially negative to positive and from initially positive to negative interactions. These violated The distinction between good and bad (pleas- expectancies produced strong reactions, but the ant and unpleasant) emotions is well established violations in the negative direction had stronger in psychology and familiar to nearly everyone. effects on attraction. Their finding that changes Although laypersons typically regard these as produced stronger reactions than consistent in- opposites, there is some evidence that the two terpersonal behavior replicated an earlier dem- are somewhat independent (e.g., Watson & Tel- onstration by Aronson and Linder (1965), but legen, 1985), and indeed measures of affect Afifi and Burgoon's work clearly showed that intensity (e.g., Larsen, Diener, & Emmons, the shift toward the negative has a more pow- 1986) rest on the assumption that positive and erful effect than the comparable shift toward the negative emotions can be positively correlated positive. That is, the largest change in attraction within person, even though a person does not occurred when the stimulus person on the vid- normally feel both at the same time. Diener, eotape started off by behaving in a friendly, Larsen, Levine, and Emmons (1985) concluded interested manner and then turned aloof and that the seeming independence is produced by a unfriendly. combination of positive correlations in affective A further investigation by Reyes et al. (1999) intensity and negative correlations in frequency. showed that both social attraction and sexual In any case, it is possible to compare positive were more strongly influenced by nega- and negative emotional states against neutral tive, unpleasant social interactions than by pos- ones. The prediction is that negative affect and itive, pleasant ones. Participants who behaved emotional distress will have stronger effects in the unpleasant style produced clear (negative) than positive affect and pleasant emotions, even reactions that were stronger than the reactions to when the two emotional states or traits are people who showed a positive, friendly interac- equally distant from the neutral position. tion style. Language provides one index of relative The notion that bad is stronger than good in power, although naturally language is subject to social interactions received a fairly explicit test multiple determinants. To the extent that nega- in a recent study. Exline and Baumeister (1999) tive emotions are more powerful and important, had people play prisoner's dilemma against a they should be more fully represented in the simulated opponent who was randomly pro- language. Sure enough, there appear to be more grammed to start off with either a cooperative words for negative than positive emotions. (good) or a defensive/exploitative (bad) move. Averill (1980) constructed a Semantic Atlas of When participants were asked to rate their op- Emotional Concepts by an exhaustive compila- ponent, the one who started off with the bad tion of 558 emotion words. When he had par- move was rated as stronger than the one who ticipants rate them, he found that there were one 332 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS and one-half times as many negative terms as Those two goals can be separated, however, and positive ones (i.e., 62% negative vs. 38% posi- one can examine the relative frequency and tive), which differed significantly from the null number of techniques for each. Doing so yields hypothesis that there would be 50% of each. a clear difference: There are many more tech- Averill also had three judges sort Anderson's niques people use for escaping bad moods than (1965) list of 555 personality traits into emo- for inducing good ones. Baumeister, Heather- tional and nonemotional traits. He then evalu- ton, and Tice (1994) noted that there are six ated them according to whether they fell above possible categories of affect regulation, consist- or below the midpoint on Anderson's original ing of efforts to induce, prolong, or terminate likeableness ratings. Among the nonemotional either a pleasant or an unpleasant state. Of traits, there was a small preponderance of pos- these, however, efforts to terminate the unpleas- itive traits (57%), but among the emotional ant states are by far the most frequently re- traits, the negative ones were in a clear majority ported. The fact that people exert disproportion- (74%). Clearly, then, there are more words for ate amounts of energy trying to escape from bad bad emotions than for good ones. moods (and in particular more than they exert to A similar conclusion emerged (although tan- induce good moods) is consistent with the hy- gentially) from a study by Van Goozen and pothesis of greater power of negative emotions. Frijda (1993). They instructed participants in The effect of induced good and bad moods on six different European countries and Canada to cognitive processing (in connection with stereo- write down as many emotion words as they types) was studied by Esses and Zanna (1995). could think of within 5 min. The researchers Across four studies, they consistently found that then tallied the 12 most frequently mentioned bad moods had a bigger impact than good words in each country. They reported that joy, moods, in terms of the discrepancies from the , anger, and (three of which are neutral mood condition. In some of the studies, negative) were the ones that made all six coun- this could be ascribed to a weaker difference tries' lists of the top dozen. If , excite- among the mood manipulations. In Experi- ment, and crying are all treated as neutral (be- ment 4, for example, the manipulation checks cause they can be either positive or negative), on self-reported moods did not yield any signif- all the countries except The Netherlands had icant difference between the neutral and good more negative than positive words among the mood induction conditions. In Experiments 2 top dozen. Thus, when people try to think of and 3, the neutral mood condition yielded emotion terms, they come up with a preponder- moods closer to the positive than the negative ance of words referring to negative emotions. mood condition. In Experiment 1, however, the This too suggests that bad emotions are more manipulation checks showed that the two mood important to label and discuss than good manipulations were about equally far apart: In emotions. terms of the autobiographical narrative in the Other work has confirmed that there are many mood induction, the pleasantness of the posi- more words to indicate negative emotional tive, neutral, and negative conditions was 2.25, states and differentiate among them than is the -.03, and -2.21, respectively, and the self-re- case for positive emotional states (Clore & Or- ported moods were 1.79,0.69, and -.49. Despite tony, 1988; Russell, Fernandez-Dols, Manstead, the apparently equal departure in mood from the & Wellenkamp, 1995). Thus, negative words neutral condition baseline, the bad mood induc- appear to be more varied than positive words, or tion produced bigger effects on ethnic outgroup at least people seem to find it more important to stereotypes: Only the negative mood induction recognize and label the distinctions between produced stereotypes that differed significantly them. from the neutral mood baseline. Thus, when good and bad moods were equidistant from the Another sign of the relative power of bad neutral control, the bad moods were found to versus good emotions is evident in research on have the stronger effects. affect regulation. People often try to change their moods and have many techniques for do- Recall for positive versus negative emotions ing so. Naturally, there is an asymmetry to their was studied by Thomas and Diener (1990), who goals: for purely hedonic reasons, people prefer compared diary and experience sampling data to avoid bad emotions and obtain good ones. against the same people's general estimates of BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 333 their emotional experiences. They found that effects were due to the greater need among people tended to underestimate the frequency of nonsecurely attached (such as avoidant) chil- positive affect, but not negative affect, which is dren to avoid negative, unpleasant emotions, consistent with the view that the relative weak- with the result that they are slower to develop an ness of positive emotional experiences makes understanding of them. This interpretation was them more forgettable. (It may also be, how- admittedly speculative. Still, it does rest on the ever, that positive affect is so much more fre- assumption that bad emotions are more impor- quent than negative affect and that the greater tant than good ones, so children who do not frequency accounts for the relative underesti- have optimal attachment patterns find it more mation. Then again, Thomas and Diener did important to downplay bad emotions than to find that people were fairly accurate in estimat- focus on good ones. ing the ratio of relative frequency of positive The emotional traits of positive and negative versus negative affect.) affectivity were studied by Major, Zubek, Coo- Likewise, recall for emotional events appears per, Cozzarelli, and Richards (1997) in terms of to favor bad ones. Finkenauer and Rime" (1998) their effects on adjustment following abortion. asked people to recall a recent, important emo- A commendable feature of Major et al.'s design tional event that they had either shared with is that they measured positive and negative out- others or kept secret. Although both positive comes separately, allowing for subjective well- and negative emotional events were welcome, being and personal distress to be assessed inde- and both were recalled, people reported far pendently. Well-being was predicted by both more bad than good events, by about a four-to- positive and , and with one margin across two studies. Thus, events roughly equal power. Distress, however, was involving bad emotions remain more salient on only predicted by negative affectivity. Thus, people's minds than events involving good negative affect influenced both outcome mea- emotions. sures, whereas positive affect influenced only People's estimations of how long or intensely one. various events will affect them has been termed There is also evidence that bad moods elicit (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, more thorough and careful information process- Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). Gilbert et al. ing than good moods (e.g., Clore, Schwarz, & found that, in general, people overestimate the Conway, 1994; Schwarz, 1990). These findings extent to which events in their lives will affect are consistent with Taylor's (1991) view that them. Moreover, the data reveal that this phe- negative information stimulates a special set of nomenon is stronger for negative events than for processes designed to cope with threat. Yet positive ones. These data suggest that people even when a person is not threatened, bad have a cognitive heuristic that informs them that moods seem to lead to greater processing. For negative events are powerful influences on sub- example, Bless, Hamilton, and Mackie (1992) sequent affective states, more so than positive induced good and bad moods and then pre- events, and therefore will affect them longer. sented to participants information about some- Children's understanding of emotional con- one else. They found that participants in good cepts was studied by Laible and Thompson moods tended to cluster information and pro- (1998) in relation to attachment style. Not sur- cess it superficially, whereas people in bad prisingly, secure attachment was linked to better moods processed it more carefully. Forgas emotional understanding in the sample (age 2.5 (1992) extended this work to study the effects of to 6 years), but this effect was mainly found good and bad moods on information about peo- with negative emotions. Positive emotions were ple who either conform to prototypes (stereo- understood about the same in the various cate- types) or violate them (e.g., the engineer who is gories. The opposite finding might have been vs. the engineer who is not interested in foot- expected, given that secure attachment is pre- ball). The strongest mood effect involved the sumably associated with more experiences of bad mood and the atypical, nonconforming per- positive rather than negative emotions, but the son, which is precisely the combination that results fit the pattern of bad emotions being also elicited the most processing. stronger (or at least more important) than good An exception to the general pattern of thor- ones. Laible and Thompson speculated that the ough, careful information processing during bad 334 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS moods was provided by Leith and Baumeister require an active response from participants (in (1996). They focused mainly on high- contrast with tasks that require the inhibition of bad moods, in contrast to most prior work that a response). The of incorrect re- has emphasized low-arousal moods such as sad- sponses (by the presentation of an aversive ness. Leith and Baumeister did, however, repli- stimulus on mistakes) was consistently found to cate the greater processing among sad partici- be more effective than the reward of correct pants. They found that highly aroused, aversive responses: Punishment led to faster learning moods led participants to curtail information than reward, across a variety of processing and make snap decisions when and rewards. Penney and Lupton (1961) and choosing what level of risk to choose (see also Penney (1968) used a loud tone as punishment, Keinan, 1987). Although this result did not con- and Meyer and Offenbach (1962) and Spence form to the general pattern of greater processing (1966) used verbal punishments ("Wrong"). with bad moods, Leith and Baumeister still Spence and Segner (1967) compared nonverbal found that bad was stronger than good. The and verbal punishments (i.e., loud tone and highly aroused, unhappy participants showed "Wrong") with nonverbal and verbal rewards distinctive patterns of high-risk and self-defeat- (i.e., candy and "Correct") and found that learn- ing behavior, whereas good-mood participants ing with both types of punishment contingen- did not differ from neutral-mood control cies led to superior learning as compared with participants. learning with either type of reward contingen- Thus, there is an assortment of evidence that cies. In other words, people learned more negative affect is stronger and more important quickly from bad events (punishment) than than positive affect. People have more words from good ones (reward). for bad emotions than good ones and use them This work was extended in methodologically more frequently. Bad emotions generally pro- rigorous ways by Costantini and Hoving (1973). duce more cognitive processing and have other Children in the reward condition received an effects on behavior that are stronger than posi- empty container and were instructed to win as tive emotions. People try harder to avoid and many marbles as possible by doing a good job escape bad moods than to induce or prolong on different performance tasks (e.g., match good moods, and they remember bad moods and emotions better. identical figures). Children in the punishment condition received a container full of marbles and were instructed to lose as few marbles as Learning possible by doing a good job on different per- formance tasks. This procedure is noteworthy Learning refers to behavioral or cognitive because it equates reward and punishment in an change resulting from situational contingencies. important sense, insofar as the same number of Reinforcement and punishment are the two marbles was contingent on performance. The main kinds of situational feedback that produce only difference was that the child would gain learning. Given the extensive research tradition marbles for success in one condition but lose in the study of learning, one might expect that marbles for errors in the other condition. (In the relative power of reward and punishment contrast, the procedure of comparing candy re- would be well established, but in fact we found it difficult to locate much in the way of direct wards vs. loud noise punishments is susceptible comparisons. One is that most learning to question about whether the rewards and pun- research has been performed with rats, in which ishments were of equal magnitude.) Because food pellets are used for rewards and electric Costantini and Hoving were interested in how shock for punishments, and it is difficult to well children could learn to inhibit responses, calibrate these so as to establish how many food the measures consisted of (a) walking as slowly pellets are equivalent to how many shocks. as possible over a board lying on the floor and (b) waiting as long as possible to tell the exper- Still, some researchers have examined the imenter after discovering matched animals. For relative power of reward and punishment. In several older studies, researchers compared the both tasks, punishment contingencies (losing effectiveness of reward-and-punishment contin- marbles) resulted in longer, more effective in- gencies on discriminative learning of tasks that hibition of responses than reward contingencies. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 335

To explain these results, Costantini and Hov- tendencies and avoidance tendencies grow ing (1973) suggested that the motivation to stronger as the object becomes nearer, but one avoid losing something is greater than the mo- "fundamental principle" from many studies was tivation of gaining something. In our view, this that "the strength of avoidance increases more conclusion is another way of saying that bad is rapidly with nearness than does that of ap- stronger than good. proach" (p. 433). Put another way, the avoid- To examine whether the effectiveness of pun- ance gradient is steeper than the comparable ishment on learning varies across developmen- approach gradient, which indicates the superior tal stages, Tindall and Ratliff (1974) conducted power of bad. Miller cited experimental studies a study among 540 first (6.4 years), fourth (9.4 by Brown (1940) that provided direct, precise years), and eighth graders (13.5 years). Children tests of these variables, such as the examination were assigned to three conditions. In the reward of how hard rats would pull against a restraint in condition, they received a token for correct re- order to approach or avoid some stimulus. In sponses (correctly identifying a particular fig- some studies, Brown used both strong and weak ure). In the punishment condition, children were versions of both the reinforcers and punishers, exposed to a loud noise for incorrect responses. but even so the avoidance gradient for the In the reward-punishment condition, they re- weaker punisher was steeper than the approach ceived both a token for a correct response and a gradient for the stronger reinforcer (see Miller, loud noise for an incorrect response. Children in 1944, p. 435). the punishment condition performed signifi- A similar conclusion was reached, in which cantly better than children in the reward and the human beings and different methods were used, reward-punishment conditions, with no signif- by Kahneman and Tversky (1982). They exam- icant difference between the two latter condi- ined the relationship between subjective and tions. A main effect for developmental stage objective values of various possible outcomes, revealed that eighth graders performed better which they termed the value function. In gen- than the first and fourth graders, but develop- eral, Kahneman and Tversky concluded that the mental stage did not show any interaction with value function is steeper for losses than for experimental condition, suggesting that punish- gains. A given increase in possible loss there- ment is relatively more effective than reward fore has a bigger impact on a decision than an across all grade levels. objectively equal increase in possible gain. Textbooks in learning and education some- One of the few ways to make reward and times assert that reward is better than punish- punishment comparable is to use money: Re- ment for learning, but they do not provide a search participants receive money for some be- clear basis for this assertion. The assertion itself haviors and lose money for others, and if the would provide an important contradiction to the amounts are identical, one can establish which general pattern of bad being stronger than good. is stronger. This strategy was used by research- Yet they may assert the superiority of reward ers in an approach-avoidance situation in con- over punishment because of various side effects nection with wagering and gambling. Atthowe of punishment, such as aggravation, anger, and (1960) had people choose among various pos- even disorientation, any of which could inter- sible wagers to see how their preferences var- fere with optimal learning. Such interference ied. Some people were completely rational, in could even occur because bad events are stron- the sense of consistently making the choices ger than good ones and because bad events with the best expected value. Others departed produce side effects, whereas good ones do not. from rationality in either direction. The "con- In any case, the studies we have reviewed show servative" individuals were defined by Atthowe that punishment is stronger than reward. We as those whose choices reflected "an overcon- were not able to find studies showing the cern with the possibility of losing money" opposite. (1960, p. 4; thus, for them, bad was stronger Another way of testing the relative power of than good). In contrast, people showing the good versus bad in learning is to compare ap- "extravagance" pattern showed the opposite proach (good) and avoidance (bad) patterns. In motivation, in which they emphasized the pos- an overview of the early research on these is- sibility of gain and disregarded the possibility of sues, Miller (1944) noted that both approach loss. Among the people in Atthowe's study who 336 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS were consistently nonrational in their choices, Neurological Processes the vast majority (83%) fell into the conserva- tive (i.e., loss-avoiding instead of gain-pursu- Some evidence suggests that responses in the ing) category. Moreover, across the entire sam- brain are stronger to bad than good things. Bar- ple, the majority (71%) of all nonrational tholow, Fabiani, Gratton, and Bettencourt choices were conservative. (1999) examined event-related brain potentials Similar findings with a different task were (ERPs) in response to participants reading about reported by J. L. Myers, Reilly, and Taub people performing acts that were either consis- (1961): Choices were more affected by the tent or inconsistent with personality descrip- chance of losing than by the chance of gaining tions. Larger amplitude P300 responses were observed following negative inconsistencies money. Thus, although there does exist a mi- (i.e., people with positive traits performing bad nority of behavior that is driven more by seek- behaviors) than positive inconsistencies (people ing gains than by avoiding losses, the clear and with bad traits performing good behaviors). consistent majority is primarily motivated by These amplitudes reflect degree of information the effort to avoid loss, which implies that for processing and thus are consistent with the ev- most people, bad is stronger than good when it idence of greater information processing. comes to financial outcomes. Even more dramatic evidence comes from Food likes and dislikes are among the most studies linking brain responses to learning and clear-cut and immediate reactions in humans. extinction of fear responses. Apparently fear- Pavlovian associative learning offers an expla- inducing events leave indelible memory traces nation for the association between food and in the brain (LeDoux, Romanski, & Xagoraris, liking. In animal studies, it has been demon- 1989; Quirk, Repa, & LeDoux, 1995). Even strated that the flavor of a certain food (condi- after the behavioral response to a fear-inducing tional stimulus) becomes intrinsically disliked conditioned stimulus has been extinguished, the after contingent presentation of this flavor with brain retains a changed pattern of neuronal fir- an unconditioned stimulus that produces nausea ing in response to that stimulus and of neuronal or vomit-producing reactions (Garcia & Koel- connections between cells (Quirk et al., 1995; ling, 1966). This effect is known as conditioned Sanghera, Rolls, & Roper-Hall, 1979). taste aversion learning. In an investigation of the effect of reaction The relative power of good and bad associ- times during a forced-choice found ates in taste learning among human beings was that even patients with brain damage are af- investigated by Baeyens, Eelen, Van den Bergh, fected by different types of feedback (Gauggel, and Crombez (1990). Artificial flavors that were Wietasch, Bayer, & Rolko, 2000). Brain-dam- initially neutral in valence were paired with aged patients with varying etiologies displayed either an aversive, distasteful substance (Tween20 faster reaction times after (false) negative feed- polysorbate 20) or a pleasant-tasting substance back (an effect that remained even when statis- (sugar). After about 12 trials, the bad stimulus tically controlling for depression), suggesting had induced participants to dislike the artificial that even among patients with profound brain flavors, and these effects were still discernible damage, bad still outweighs good. in a follow-up measure 1 week later. The pleas- The existence of a specific brain mechanism ant stimulus failed to induce participants to like to detect self-generated errors (Luu et al., 2000) the flavors any better, nor was there any signif- also suggests that the brain is wired to react icant effect on the delayed measure. Thus, the more strongly to bad than good. Errors and bad stimulus had a stronger effect than the good mistakes are, obviously, unintended responses one, in terms of learning. and hence are more likely to lead to bad out- Thus, there are several findings indicating comes than good outcomes. Research confirms that learning and conditioning are more strongly the existence of a neurological process that rec- affected by bad things than good, even when the ognizes self-initiated errors. For instance, stud- objective magnitude of good and bad is pre- ies in which participants are asked to make cisely equated. People appear to be predisposed continued response adjustments have shown to learn more rapidly and easily about the cor- that participants know they have made an error, relates of negative than of positive events. even in the absence of feedback (e.g., Rabbitt, BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 337

1966). Moreover, there is a discernible change tion. The extinction of a fear response is there- in the electrophysiological state of the brain that fore not a genuine case of unlearning, it merely occurs soon after an error is made (within 80- reflects a behavioral adaptation. The organism 100 ms). This brain response is measured by retains the readiness to respond with fear again, using ERP methods and is called error-related so subsequent relearning of the fear response negativity (ERN). The results of another ERP would be facilitated. Clearly, this would be an study also support the existence of a neural adaptive pattern insofar as once a threat is rec- marker for error detection (Miltner, Braun, & ognized, the person or animal will remember Coles, 1997). Using ERP methods, Miltner et the threat more or less forever. al. found a pattern in the anterior cingulate—a neurological substrate thought to be central to Child Development self-regulatory abilities (see Posner, 1994)— similar to the negative pattern reported by Luu, Fairly little work is available to examine the Collins, & Tucker (2000). Moreover, Miltner et relative power of good versus bad events on al. saw this neurological marker across three child development. An authoritative work by different sensory modalities (visual, auditory, the eminent developmentalist Scarr (1992) di- and somatosensory), suggesting that our brains rectly addressed the effects of good versus bad have a generic system for recognizing self-ini- environments on child development. She pro- tiated errors. posed that normal development depends on Recently it has been suggested that ERN may having an environment that falls within the nor- "represent a means of tracking human self-mon- mal range. Anything outside that range impairs itoring in real time" (p. 45, Luu et al., 2000). It development. Scarr cited "violent, abusive, and is noteworthy that errors, which themselves are neglectful families" (1992, p. 5) as examples of bad (because they are unintended responses) such environments that can harm child devel- and which are strongly linked to aversive con- opment. The thrust of Scarr's argument was that sequences, appear to have a neurological corre- having exceptionally good parents or a positive late; whereas there does not seem to be an environment would not produce any better de- analogous neurological reaction for correct velopment than having average parents and an responses. average environment; whereas having bad par- The effect of negative versus positive stimuli ents or a bad environment can inflict lasting on neurological indices of evaluative categori- harm. Thus, only the bad, and not the good, can zation also supports our proposition that bad produce effects that go beyond the average or outweighs good. Using ERP , Ito, normal. Cacioppo, and Lang (1998) found that brain Perhaps the most conclusive data come from activation consistent with operations at the eval- cognitive and intellectual development. It is uative categorization stage changed as a func- fairly well established that intelligence (IQ) is tion of the pleasantness and unpleasantness of consistently correlated with social class, as well visual images participants were viewing. Across as being strongly influenced by genes and he- two experiments, larger amplitude brain re- redity (e.g., Jensen, 1998). The correlation with sponses were found when viewing negative ver- social class can be interpreted as fitting several sus positive stimuli. Moreover, this effect oc- different causal hypotheses, and indeed the con- curred despite equating positive and negative troversial work by Herrnstein and Murray stimuli with respect to probability, evaluative (1994) proposed that IQ is a decisive determi- extremity, and arousal. That there were valance- nant of social class, because low intelligence related differences at the evaluative categoriza- leads to lower success in life. Other authors tion stage (as opposed to the output stage, for have, however, emphasized the opposite causal example) indicates that bad outweighs good at a direction, proposing that social class affects IQ, motivational level. either through the good effects of a well-off Although the evidence has only begun accru- family or the harmful effects of growing up in a ing, it suggests that the brain responds more poor, disadvantaged environment. strongly to bad than good things and that it Any effect of rich or poor families has to retains the memory of bad things, even when overcome the strong genetic contribution to IQ. the behavioral response has undergone extinc- Recently, some researchers have begun to ex- 338 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS amine how the relative contributions of good environments do not—fitting the view that and nurture (operationalized in terms of genetic bad environments are stronger. heredity vs. shared family environment) may Thus, we do not have extensive data compar- change as a function of social class. This per- ing good versus bad influences on child devel- mits a rather precise comparison of whether bad opment, but the available data are methodolog- is stronger than good: Does the family environ- ically quite strong because of the research de- ment overcome the genetic contribution more sign that separates environmental from genetic effectively in good or poor families? Put an- effects. The evidence is consistent with the view other way, one assumes that children start off that bad is stronger than good. with a genetic blueprint for a certain level of intelligence, and the crucial questions are Social Support whether good parents can increase their chil- dren's IQ above that level, whether poor parents Over the past couple decades, the importance can decrease their children's IQ below that of social support has been established as central same level, or both. to health and well-being. Social support is usu- The educational level of parents was selected ally defined in terms of emotional bolstering for investigation by Rowe, Jacobson, and Van and practical assistance received from other den Oord (1999). Consistent with the view that people, particularly friends, relatives, and other bad is stronger than good, they found that the relationship partners. Interactions with such in- dividuals are not invariably positive, however, influence of family educational level (relative to and certainly conflict, undermining, and other heredity) was stronger at the low end. More detrimental interactions are possible. If bad is precisely, the genetic heritability of intelligence stronger than good, we would predict that these (IQ) was strong and significant among highly aversive interactions with relationship partners educated families but was weak and nonsignif- will have a stronger impact on health, well- icant among poorly educated families. The ef- being, and other outcomes than will positive, fects of shared environment on children's IQ supportive interactions. Given the general thrust showed the complementary pattern, with the of social support research toward showing pos- effect of the shared family environment ap- itive, beneficial effects, the social support liter- proaching zero among the highly educated fam- ature may be regarded on an a priori basis as a ilies but having an appreciable and significant fairly hostile sphere in which to test the hypoth- effect among the poorly educated families. esis about the greater power of bad things. Thus, a relatively poor family environment was able to overcome the genetic contribution to Various findings have indicated that negative or upsetting social support weighs more heavily intelligence, but the good family environment than positive or helpful social support (e.g., had no effect and simply allowed the genes to Manne, Taylor, Dougherty, & Kemeny, 1997). determine the children's intelligence. Parents One important approach has people furnish sep- can make their genetically bright children less arate ratings of the good and bad behaviors of intelligent, but they cannot apparently make the members of their social network (e.g., being their unintelligent ones (or any others) smarter. a source of conflict and distress vs. being help- Similar results were obtained in another ful and optimistic). Fiore, Becker, and Coppel study using father's occupational level. Among (1983) used this method and found that the the occupationally successful fathers, children's degree to which a person rated his or her net- IQ depended mainly on genetic heredity, work members as upsetting was more predictive whereas with less successful fathers the family of depression than was the rated degree of environment effect was strong and the genetic helpfulness. contribution was minimal (Thompson, Tiu, & Similarly, Rook (1984) found that helpful Detterman, 1999). These findings converge aspects of the social networks of older widowed with those of Rowe et al. (1999) and indicate women were generally unrelated to psycholog- that the effects of parenting and other environ- ical adjustment and well-being, but problem- mental experiences on children are mainly neg- atic, unhelpful aspects of the widows' networks ative: Bad family environments override the were associated with lower levels of adjustment effect of genetic heredity on intelligence, but and well-being, even after controlling for sev- BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 339 eral demographic and health-related variables. though. For one, most of the disclosures were More precisely, the number of interpersonal selectively aimed only at people who the problems and the number of people who pro- women expected would be supportive: Women vided problematic or confiictual interactions did not disclose the abortion to someone who both predicted (lower) well-being, whereas the was likely to be disapproving, so the range was number of sources of positive social support severely restricted. Furthermore, the effects failed to predict anything (except , were obtained mainly after controlling for pos- which seems a trivially obvious effect). Rook itive and negative affectivity, and these vari- concluded that aversive social interactions have ables strongly colored the of social stronger effects on well-being than positive so- support and conflict. As noted previously, in cial interactions. terms of pure effects not already adjusted by Using an older sample of both genders, Okun, valence, negative affectivity had a stronger im- Melichar, and Hill (1990) found stronger (cor- pact overall than the positive, on both types of relational) effects for bad than good social ties outcomes combined. and for bad than good daily events. The bad Social support and social conflict (undermin- aspects of the social network predicted psycho- ing) were examined by Vinokur and van Ryn logical distress more strongly than the good (1993) in a sample of people who had lost their aspects. The independent contributions of good jobs within the past 4 months, with follow-up and bad aspects of one's social support network questionnaires 2 months and 4 months later. on people caring for a spouse with Alzheimer's Independent measures were given for social disease were assessed by Pagel, Erdly, and support and social conflict or undermining, and Becker (1987) in a 10-month longitudinal study. these had been designed to look at behaviors They found that positive aspects (such as help- that would, in principle, have precisely opposite fulness) were unrelated to depression and social effects (i.e., restoring vs. diminishing self- support satisfaction. Negative aspects such as up- worth). Despite the implicit parallel, the mea- setting interactions, however, predicted greater sures of social conflict and social support were depression and lower satisfaction with the social not opposite ends of a single factor. They were network. Even after controlling for initial de- negatively correlated at about -.70, but were pression and initial problems, changes in nega- tive aspects of social support over time pre- found to be largely independent factors with dicted changes in depression. quite different effects on other variables. Most relevant were the effects on mental Similar findings were reported by Finch, Okun, Barrera, Zautra, and Reich (1989). Their health, which was assessed by measures of anx- sample consisted of recently disabled or re- iety and depression scales from a symptom in- cently bereaved older adults and a matched con- dex. Social conflict or undermining was signif- trol group. Positive social ties predicted positive icantly related to mental health at all three well-being, whereas negative social ties pre- times, with correlations growing from .20 at dicted both well-being and distress. Time 1 to .47 on the final survey 4 months later. The effects of social conflict and social sup- In contrast, positive social support had a weak port on coping with abortion were studied by (r = -.20) relation to mental health at Time 1 Major et al. (1997). They concluded that con- and even weaker, nonsignificant relationships at flict in close relationships had a greater impact later times. Thus, positive social interactions in than support on postabortion distress, although the form of social support had only a weak support in close relationships had a greater im- effect on mental health, and only at first, pact on postabortion well-being. These results whereas social conflict continued to have a fit an affect-matching view (i.e., good things strong (and, if anything, an increasing) effect on have an impact on good feelings, whereas bad mental health throughout the period of study. things have an impact on bad feelings) rather Vinokur and van Ryn (1993) concluded that bad than the simpler blanket position that bad is interactions are more influential than good ones: stronger than good, so their results could be "Interpersonal conflicts that are expressed in considered partly contrary to the main thrust undermining behaviors appear to have a stron- here. Several features of their study prevent it ger concurrent impact on mental health than from serving as powerful contrary evidence, supportive behaviors" (p. 358). 340 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, F1NKENAUER, AND VOHS

The separate effects of support and hindrance checklist for depressive symptoms). Compari- from one's social network were studied by son of the trends however suggested that the Ruehlman and Wolchik (1988) in a large sam- negative interactions had a stronger effect. ple of undergraduates. They asked participants Taken together, thus these studies suggest to choose the three adults who were most im- that helpful aspects of one's social network bear portant to them in their current life situation and little or no relation to depression, well-being, to report the degree to which these individuals and social support satisfaction, while upsetting supported and hindered the four most important or unhelpful aspects do. Some findings fit an personal projects and goals in the participant's affect-matching view, in which positive interac- current life. The researchers found that support tions predict positive outcomes whereas nega- and hindrance were largely independent, and tive interactions predict negative ones. Even in indeed the correlations between support and those findings, however, there appears to be an hindrance by the same person ranged from .00 asymmetry: Bad interactions have stronger, to .11. They found that project hindrance pre- more pervasive, and longer lasting effects. dicted both well-being (i.e., positive psycholog- ical functioning) and distress (negative psycho- Information Processing logical functioning). Project support, on the other hand, predicted only well-being. Although The extent of information processing is an their findings represent only cross-sectional cor- important indicator of power and importance. relations, and causal interpretation is therefore High motivation and pragmatic concerns cause necessarily speculative, these findings do point people to process relevant information more toward the same conclusion that bad events thoroughly (e.g., Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Insofar have more pervasive effects than good events. as people are cognitive misers, they cannot af- These results also fit the broader pattern in ford to process all information to an equally full which bad events affect both good and bad extent, so they must prioritize their cognitive outcomes, whereas good events only affect resources and focus on what is important. If bad good outcomes. is generally stronger than good, then informa- The role of social support versus social con- tion pertaining to bad events should receive flict or undermining was studied in relation to more thorough processing than information several different sources of support by Abbey, about good events. The greater information pro- Abramis, and Caplan (1985). With regard to the cessing may be reflected in paying more atten- person closest to the respondent, bad was tion to them and in elaborating them more thor- clearly stronger than good: Social conflict was oughly or constructing more extensive cogni- related to three of the four measures of well- tive interpretations (such as attributions). The being, whereas social support did not correlate more extensive processing will also tend to lead significantly with any of them. Likewise, when to enhanced memory for bad material, although participants reported on support and conflict this tendency may sometimes be offset if the from "some one person," conflict predicted with main goal and thrust of the processing involve more (four) indices of well-being, whereas sup- defensive responses that retroactively minimize port predicted only one. For the vaguest cate- the bad events and thus conspire to erase them gory, however, social support versus conflict from memory (cf. Taylor, 1991). with people in general, both support and conflict Early evidence that bad things get more predicted well-being on almost all of the mea- thought was provided by Klinger, Barta, and sures. These results suggest that bad is stronger Maxeiner (1980). On a self-report scale, people than good when considering particular and im- claimed to devote more thought to their goals portant individuals, but across the broadly non- that were blocked than to other categories (in- specific social network, bad and good social cluding positive things). Threatened personal relations were about equally important. relationships and projects that had encountered Supportive and negative interactions with unexpected difficulties topped the list of most spouses, friends, and relatives were also exam- frequent topics of thought. ined by Schuster, Kessler, and Aseltine (1990). The quantity of in response to var- Both types of interactions had effects on emo- ious interpersonal events was studied by Abele tional functioning (measured in terms of a (1985). People engaged in more thinking and BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 341 reasoning about bad than good events. A further (1985). Spontaneous attributional activity was and noteworthy feature of Abele's research is defined as people's efforts to explain what is that she also explicitly manipulated whether the happening to them and to identify a cause for event was expected or unexpected. This vari- what happened. In all studies in which positive able yielded its own main effect (unexpected events were contrasted with negative ones, events produced more cognitions), but it did not spontaneous attributional activity was greater interact with valence. Thus, bad events elicit for negative (e.g., failures) than for positive more processing than good events, even when events (e.g., successes). the expectedness of the event is held constant. Pratto and John (1991) set out to test whether This suggests that the greater power of bad attentional resources are automatically directed cannot be reduced to expectancy effects, con- away from the current task when extraneous trary to one of the theories we have proposed. stimuli, either good or bad, are presented. Using Quantity (duration) of cognitive processing a modified Stroop paradigm, the researchers was measured by Fiske (1980), who showed presented participants with personality trait ad- people photographs of various behaviors that jectives (e.g., sadistic, honest), and participants varied in positivity versus negativity. The os- were instructed to name the color ink in which tensible purpose of the photographs was to form each word was printed. To the extent that atten- impressions. Participants spent longer viewing tion was automatically seized by the meaning of the photographs depicting negative than posi- the trait, participants would be slower to name tive behaviors, suggesting that people paid more the color. In the first study, people took longer attention to bad than good acts when forming to name the ink color when the word referred to impressions. a bad trait than when it was a good trait. Thus, More generally, it is generally assumed that the meanings of bad traits had greater power for people seek to understand events that happen to attracting attention, as compared with good them, and attributional processing is part of this traits. Retrospective self-reports indicated that search for meaning (e.g., Baumeister, 1991; participants claimed they ignored the words and Frankl, 1963; Taylor, 1983). To find meaning, concentrated on the colors, which is consistent people can try to find a cause that provides them with the view that any interference occurred at with an answer to the question as to why certain an automatic and not a fully conscious level. events happened or they can try to find a dif- In a second study, Pratto and John (1991) ferent interpretation and reframe their experi- replicated the greater interference by bad than ences. Some evidence suggests that negative good traits and also showed that people had events cause people to engage in greater search greater memory for the bad than for the good for meaning and making sense than positive traits: Participants were twice as likely to re- events. Baumeister concluded from a broad re- member the bad ones than the good ones. This view that unpleasant events stimulate the need suggests that the automatic shifting of attention for meaning to a greater degree than positive or to the bad traits stimulated some incidental pleasant events. An empirical test of the differ- learning, resulting in the superior recall. In a ence was conducted by Gilovich (1983), who third study, Pratto and John replicated the ef- examined spontaneous thinking about important fects despite explicitly varying the base rates of outcomes. Participants in his study first placed good and bad traits, in order to rule out the bets on sporting events and either lost or won hypothesis that bad information is stronger sim- money. About 1 week after the event took place, ply because it is more unusual. The manipula- they came back into the laboratory to settle their tion of base rates (i.e., whether the stimulus set bets with the experimenter. They also provided contained more good or more bad traits in total) tape-recorded accounts of their current thoughts was not significant, whereas the valence imbal- about the games. The amount of time spent ance remained significant across different base discussing the game was greater for the lost rates. The authors concluded that bad informa- games than for the winning games. This differ- tion, at least in the form of undesirable trait ence reflects a greater search for meaning for terms, has more power than good information bad than for good outcomes. for attracting attention in an automatic, nonin- A similar conclusion emerged from a review tentional fashion, and that this effect is not due of 17 studies on causal attribution by Weiner to greater informativeness of diagnosticity 342 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

(based on generally positive expectations and other participant's happy rather than sad behav- base rates). ior. They speculated, however, that sad behav- The greater attention to bad than good was ior can result from a variety of causes, so it is shown in a different way by Graziano, Brothen, complex and not sufficiently unambiguous (di- and Berscheid (1980). Participants received ei- agnostic) to permit a spontaneous inference. In ther a positive or a negative evaluation from support of this conclusion, Krull and Dill re- another person. They viewed the other person's ported that participants were significantly evaluation on videotape. Across conditions, all slower at making either inferences about the participants monitored the negative evaluation causes of sad behavior as compared with happy video for significantly more time (56% of the behavior. The slower reaction time is consistent total time) than the positive evaluation video with the general theme of greater processing (44% of the total time). This difference was with regard to negative than positive informa- more pronounced when participants expected to tion. In plain terms, people can make snap judg- interact with the other person as compared with ments about someone who seems happy, but when participants did not expect any future they engage in longer and more complex (but interaction. less conclusive) thinking about someone who Attention to emotionally expressive faces seems sad. was studied by Oehman, Lundqvist, and Es- The longer time taken for the attributions teves (2001). Schematically drawn faces were about negative behaviors may be related to the presented in groups, and some of them had greater specificity of negative traits. Claeys and either a happy smiling face or a threatening, Timmers (1993) found that bad traits are more frowning face. Threatening faces were detected specifically and narrowly defined than good more quickly and accurately than the smiling traits, in the sense that the bad traits are seen as faces under most conditions. A no-difference more different from each other and encompass a result was obtained under one condition (in- narrower range of behaviors. The greater spec- volving a background matrix of friendly faces ificity of bad traits may be a linguistic sign of and a short processing time), but overall the the greater power or importance of bad than frowning faces were noticed better. good, parallel to the preponderance of words for Another sign of the attentional priority of bad bad than good emotions. over good was furnished by Marshall and Kidd There is also some evidence that affective (1981), who conducted a series of studies ask- consequences of negative information are stron- ing whether participants preferred to hear good ger than those of good information. Ikegami or bad news first, provided that both were forth- (1993) primed people by having them write coming. Across several studies, they found a first-person sentences containing friendly, hos- strong majority consistently (from 77% to 88%) tile, or neutral words. The hostile priming had asked to hear the bad news first. The greater stronger and longer lasting effects on subse- processing of bad than good events was shown quent emotional states than either the positive or by Holtzworth-Munroe and Jacobson (1985) in the neutral primes. the context of marital relationships. Participants Some apparent exceptions may be found in generated lists of positive and negative events, the special category of bad feedback about the frequent and infrequent, that were occurring in self, which people are motivated to avoid. their marriage. They were then presented with Baumeister and Cairns (1992) found that repres- various items from the list in random order and sors devoted less processing time to unfavor- asked to list their thoughts and feelings that able personality feedback, under some condi- would occur if each event were happening right tions. The tendency to avoid bad feedback prob- now. The aversive partner behaviors, regardless ably does not indicate any lack of strength on of whether frequent or infrequent, led to more the part of the individual, however. More likely, attributional activity than positive partner it reflects a tendency to want to shield the self behaviors. from the negative impact (such as potential loss The issue is somewhat more complicated in of self-esteem). Even in this work, moreover, reactions to other people's emotion displays. bad information did receive exceptionally long Krull and Dill (1998) found that participants processing when it could not easily be dis- made more spontaneous trait inferences from missed and avoided, so even the apparent ex- BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 343 ception to the general pattern was found under also found by Bless et al. (1992). Participants only limited conditions. remembered bad behaviors better than good The more extensive and elaborate processing ones. Skowronski and Carlston (1987) also of bad than good material has been amply con- found that bad behaviors were recalled better firmed in practical contexts outside of the lab- than good ones, for both extreme and moderate oratory, too. Among journalists and communi- levels. cation scientists, it is considered common On the other hand, that flatter the self knowledge that bad events are more newswor- make recall of one's own bad behaviors less thy and attract more reader attention. Periodic likely. Skowronski, Betz, Thompson, and Shan- calls for the news to focus more on positive, non (1991) explicitly compared memory for uplifting stories get nowhere, not because jour- everyday life events for both the self and for nalists are sadists or misanthropes, but because another person such as a friend whom the par- bad news sells more papers. Likewise, Fiedler's ticipant saw almost every day. They found no (1966/1982) authoritative history of novels in- difference in recall for the friend's pleasant cluded the pointed observation that no one has versus unpleasant events, but for the self there ever been able to make a successful novel about was a memory bias in favor of the pleasant a happy marriage, whereas marital problems events (although this was limited to events with have filled countless novels. Thus, the most intermediate typicality; typical and atypical widely read classes of writers—journalists and events were recalled better, regardless of pleas- novelists—both devote the bulk of their writing antness). These findings suggest that there are to elaborating bad rather than good events. certain memory biases that downplay bad expe- Thus, bad information does receive more thor- riences of the self but not of other people, ough information processing than good infor- consistent with Taylor's (1991) minimization mation. Bad information is more likely to seize hypothesis. attention, and it receives more conscious pro- Also supportive of a motivation to minimize cessing as well. The one exception to this gen- negative events are the findings from a study in eral rule involves unflattering information about which the researchers examined whether recol- the self that some individuals such as repressors lection of the emotional intensity of a personal may simply avoid. event changed as a function on time and initial positivity or negativity of the event (Walker, Memory Vogl, & Thompson, 1997). Walker et al. as- sessed participants' evaluations of personal ex- Memory should be most subject to a positiv- periences—both positive and negative—as they ity bias, in view of the minimization processes occurred and then reassessed their evaluations that selectively erase bad (Taylor, of these experiences at intervals of 3 months, 1 1991) and other repressive processes. Yet even year, and 4.5 years. Consistent with previous with memory, there is some evidence that bad is findings (e.g., Holmes, 1970), they found that stronger than good, although this effect is the affective intensity of a memory fades as bounded by self-enhancement processes and time progressed and that this effect was espe- mood-congruent recall processes. cially true for memories of negative events. Interviews with children and adults up to 50 That is, the drop in intensity was steeper for years old (in separate studies) about childhood memories of negative, compared with positive, memories found a preponderance of unpleasant events. Notably, the content of the memories memories, even among people who rated their remained intact over time. The researchers in- childhoods as having been relatively pleasant terpreted this finding as indicating that people and happy (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1968). effortfully target the emotional intensity of neg- Likewise, superior recall for unfavorable in- ative events, hoping to diminish their subse- formation was shown by Dreben, Fiske, and quent influence (see Taylor, 1991). Hastie (1979). Regardless of serial position, Cognitive psychologists have examined sentences describing people's undesirable be- whether bad items are processed and remem- haviors were recalled better than sentences de- bered better than positive ones. Robinson- scribing desirable or neutral behaviors. The su- Riegler and Winton (1996) confirmed that par- perior memory for bad than for good things was ticipants showed better recognition memory for 344 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS negative than positive items. Furthermore, they biased toward negativity, which would be yet were better able to recall the source of bad than another sign that bad is stronger than good. good information, as shown by their ability to One important source of formation identify which stimuli had come to them in a and persistence is based on second as opposed to a first phase; whereas the distinctive events. A meta-analytic review of 23 positive stimuli seemed simply to get all mixed studies on this pattern was conducted by Mullen together. These findings suggest that the bad and Johnson (1990). They found that distinctive material received more thorough processing negative behaviors have stronger effects, in the when it was encoded and was, therefore, re- sense of being better able to generate illusory tained in a more complex, elaborate memory correlations, than distinctive positive behaviors trace. or neutral behaviors. In particular, minority Ohira, Winton, and Oyama (1997) extended groups (which are already salient by virtue of Robinson-Riegler and Winton's work by in- minority status) are likely to be assigned unde- cluding measures of eyeblinks and latency, both sirable stereotypes based on illusory correlations. of which have been associated with increased One important sign of differential power conscious processing. They too found that par- would be the relative ease with which stereo- ticipants remembered (recognized) negative types are formed and disconfirmed, as a func- words more successfully than positive words. tion of whether the stereotype is favorable or The negative words were also associated with unfavorable. Rothbart and Park (1986) found slower responses and more eyeblinks, both of strong correlations between the favorability of a which indicate greater conscious processing. trait and the number of instances required for its These findings fit the view that negative mate- confirmation (r = .71) and discontinuation (r = rial evokes more extensive conscious activity, -.70). Specifically, the more unfavorable the which in turn produces better memory for the trait, the fewer the number of instances required material. for confirmation and the greater the number of In contrast, there is evidence for mood-con- instances necessary for disconfirmation. gruent recall for semantic material (for a re- In other words, bad reputations are easy to view, see Matt, Vasquez, & Campbell, 1992). acquire but difficult to lose, whereas good rep- Nondepressed individuals show a bias toward utations are difficult to acquire but easy to lose. recalling positively valenced stimulus words; These findings suggest that unfavorable charac- depressed individuals recall equal numbers of teristics once acquired as part of a stereotype positively valenced and negatively valenced may be difficult to lose in part because a large stimulus words. number of observations are necessary for their In summary, three psychological forces ap- disconfirmation. The findings certainly confirm pear to collide in the human memory. The mem- that bad is stronger than good: It takes far more ory literature does supply limited evidence for to overcome the bad than the good trait, and the greater power of bad over good, but this more to change the bad than the good does not appear to be the dominant force. This reputation. evidence coexists with a tendency for individu- als to recall positive information (a self-en- Forming Impressions hancement effect), particularly when in a posi- tive mood (a mood-congruent recall effect). Impression formation is one of the few topics This is true for self-relevant memories and se- with which researchers have recognized and mantic recall. discussed a general pattern of valence imbal- ance (e.g., Kanouse & Hanson, 1972). The Stereotypes usual term is positive—negative asymmetry, in- dicating that bad information about a stimulus A generalization about a category or group of person or new acquaintance carries more weight people can in principle be either good or bad. and has a larger impact on impressions than Although undoubtedly some stereotypes are fa- good information (e.g., Peeters & Czapinski, vorable, the majority of them appear to be neg- 1990). ative and pejorative. This suggests that the pro- An early demonstration of this asymmetry cess of forming and maintaining stereotypes is was provided by Anderson (1965), who pre- BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 345 sumably hoped for different findings because he traits, and Hodges then calculated whether the was trying to advance an additive and averaging combined impression deviated from the average model of impression formation. That is, he of the two traits. A pure averaging model suc- sought to show that people form impressions of cessfully predicted impressions when only both someone by adding up and averaging all of the traits were positive. In all others, the more neg- information they have about that person, good ative trait carried greater weight. Thus, even and bad alike. when both traits were negative, the total impres- To support his averaging model, Anderson sion was more negative than a simple averaging (1965) provided participants with various per- of the two traits would predict. Of course, when sonality traits that allegedly characterized a the traits were one of each, the bad one carried stimulus person. These traits had been given more weight. Thus, bad information consis- precise weights based on favorability ratings, so tently had a stronger effect on the final he carefully chose positive and negative traits impression. that were equally distant from the neutral point Hamilton and Huffman (1971) also found on the favorability scale. The participants were that undesirable traits received more weight in then asked to rate their overall impression of the impression formation than did desirable ones. stimulus person. Anderson could then investi- The authors explained this on the basis of dis- gate how these global impressions departed tinctive usefulness of information: Because from the midpoint of the scale as a function of good behavior is common and expected, bad how the various traits departed from the favor- things are more revealing and hence more im- ability midpoint. He found that the bad trait portant to know. Hamilton and Zanna (1972) adjectives were stronger than the good ones. found that negative traits exerted a stronger The mean ratings of stimulus persons defined by effect than positive traits on impressions, as all negative traits departed farther from the shown by greater departure from the mean rat- global scale midpoint than did the mean ratings ings of neutral targets. Moreover, negative traits of stimulus persons defined by all positive traits, had a stronger effect than positive traits on even though the traits were equally distant from participants' in their impressions. the midpoint. Furthermore, when stimulus per- That is, raters were more confident of the accu- sons were described with both favorable and racy of their bad impression of someone with unfavorable traits, the unfavorable ones lowered bad traits than they were confident about their the global impression rating more than a simple good impression of someone with good traits. additive or averaging model would predict, un- Taken together, these findings show that bad like the favorable traits, which did not exert an information has greater power both objectively influence beyond averaging. Anderson con- and subjectively. The objective power is shown cluded that unfavorable trait adjectives were in the stronger effect on the impression, and the more powerful than favorable ones in shaping subjective power is shown in the greater confi- impressions. dence in the accuracy of the impression. Another early demonstration was provided Evidence that negative information carries by Feldman (1966; see also discussion in more weight than positive information in terms Wright, 1991), who was also interested in av- of influence on likeability was provided by eraging models. Participants in his study pro- Fiske (1980). She showed photographs depict- vided ratings of stimulus persons who had been ing various behaviors that differed in valence described with one positive, one negative, or (i.e., positive or negative) and extremity. Neg- one of each type of adjective. The overall rat- ative behaviors had more impact on likeability ings of people described by both positive and than positive information, especially when the negative labels were more negative than a sim- level of extremity was high. The greater power ple averaging of impressions would have pre- of bad information than good information has dicted: Thus, the bad information carried more continued to be found in recent work (e.g., weight. Wyer and Hinkle (1971) likewise found Vonk, 1993, 1996, 1999; Vonk & Knippenberg, that bad information carried more weight in 1994). impression formation than in good information. The greater power of bad than good informa- Similar findings were provided by Hodges tion can also be seen in speed of decision mak- (1974). Participants in his study rated pairs of ing and the amount of information sought. Yzer- 346 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS byt and Ley ens (1991) had participants make more stringent for good than bad traits. To be decisions about whether a given actor was categorized as good, one has to be good all of suited to play a theatre role that was described the time (consistently). To be categorized as as likeable or unlikable. Participants were told bad, a few bad acts are sufficient, and presum- how much total information was available about ably hardly anyone is consistently bad. Hence, each actor and were given this information a negative behaviors carry more weight than pos- little at a time, so they were free to make a itive behaviors for ruling out some categories. decision as soon as they felt confident enough to The diagnosticity view was tested in a later do so. The greater impact of negative trait in- paper by Skowronski and Carlston (1992). They formation was shown in speedier decisions (i.e., noted that to be morally good means to be with less information): A little evidence that the always good, whereas does not re- actor was unlikable was enough to discredit him quire consistent immorality, so single immoral or her for the likeable role. In contrast, a small behaviors are more diagnostic. For example, amount of evidence that an actor was likeable one may be regarded as a liar despite telling the was not enough to disqualify him or her for the truth on many occasions, but one will not be unlikable role. (That is, with the unlikable role, regarded as an honest man if he tells many lies. the difference was eliminated but not signifi- The opposite may apply to intelligence, how- cantly reversed.) When initial information was ever, because a stupid person can never be favorable but unfavorable information followed brilliant, whereas a very intelligent person can it (with the likeable role), participants shifted occasionally do a stupid thing. Skowronski and strongly and quickly to rejecting the candidate, Carlston did find that the negativity bias held which again shows a disproportionately strong true for moral behaviors but was reversed for impact of bad traits. In general, then, people intelligence-related behaviors: Extremely posi- made faster decisions with less information tive (intelligent) acts had a bigger effect than when they were given negative rather than pos- extremely negative ones. itive information. The greater power of bad in the sphere of The evidence and theories about the positive- moral behavior was the focus of Riskey and negative asymmetry were reviewed by Skow- Birnbaum (1974) in an article with the revealing ronski and Carlston (1989). These authors also subtitle, "Two Don't Make Up for a put forward their own theory, based on category Wrong." They found that morally bad actions diagnosticity (see also Czapinski, 1986). The create a powerful effect on overall judgment, basic assumptions of their theory were, first, and this effect is only slightly mitigated by that people categorize other individuals by us- adding morally good actions. Riskey and Birn- ing available informational cues. Second, peo- baum's conclusion was "the overall goodness of ple see some behaviors as more helpful than a person is determined mostly by his worst bad others in discriminating between various trait deed, with good deeds having lesser influ- categorizations. In other words, some behaviors ence. .. . Given a person has done evil, an are more informative than others. For example, infinite number of good deeds may not produce the behavior of stealing is more informative a favorable overall impression" (p. 172). Skow- about someone's honesty than is the behavior of ronski and Carlston (1992) found that the im- running. This usefulness of behaviors for mak- pression impact of morally good behaviors was ing such judgments is what Skowronski and easily overridden by new information depicting Carlston meant by category diagnosticity. immoral behaviors, but the reverse did not hold: Third, attributes perceived as more diagnostic An initial impression based on morally bad be- for category membership will be more influen- haviors was not easily changed by new infor- tial in impression formation than others. Fourth, mation about morally good behaviors. and most relevant, extreme or negative behav- Some researchers have pointed out that in iors are perceived as more diagnostic than mod- certain domains, positive information should erate or positive behaviors. carry more weight. Skowronski and Carlston Why should this be so? Skowronski and Carl- (1987) contended that diagnosticity helps pre- ston (1989) proposed that bad behaviors are dict differential weighting of information as a more diagnostic than good ones simply because function of whether the judgment pertains to the category requirements of consistency are or competence. With morality, bad BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 347 acts are more diagnostic because only immoral opinions changed as a function of new good or people do bad things, whereas both moral and bad information about a candidate. Across a immoral people do good things. With ability, variety of measures and procedures, they found however, good performances should be more consistently that bad information exerted a diagnostic than bad ones because only compe- more powerful effect than good information. tent people achieve superior performances, For example, if the initial judgment favored whereas both competent and incompetent peo- hiring (i.e., ), only 3.8 unfavorable ple can perform badly. Their findings confirmed bits of information were required to shift the a negativity bias with moral traits (e.g., dishon- decision to rejection; whereas 8.8 favorable est behaviors influenced impressions more than pieces of information were necessary to shift an honest ones) but a positivity bias with traits initially negative decision toward acceptance. based on competence (e.g., intelligent behaviors Likewise, Webster (1964) concluded that per- had a stronger effect than stupid ones). The sonnel interviewers use unfavorable informa- dependent variable in these studies was the par- tion as a basis for rejecting candidates to a ticipant's estimate that the stimulus person greater extent than they use favorable informa- would act a certain way in the future, which tion as a basis for hiring them. Webster sug- differs from simply giving a subjective judg- gested that it was more common (and hence ment of favorability or likeability. Thus, the presumably required less information) to results indicate mainly that having performed change from a favorable to an unfavorable im- well (i.e., competently) leads to stronger predic- pression of a candidate than to change from tions about future performance than having per- unfavorable to favorable. formed badly, whereas having acted immorally The influence of speaking with positive ver- leads to stronger predictions about future per- sus negative words on impressions was studied formance than having acted morally. by Berry, Pennebaker, Mueller, and Hiller Similar results were reported by Martijn, (1997). They instructed one set of participants Spears, van der Pligt, and Jakobs (1992), but to "tell us about yourself and what is going on with an added twist that they surveyed the net in your life," and they videotaped these effect of various combinations on overall im- speeches. The tapes were then shown to other pressions. The global impression was more af- participants, who rated each one on several di- fected by bad behaviors than good ones, regard- mensions. Berry et al. found that people used far less of whether the information referred to abil- more positive than negative emotion words in ity or morality. That is, Martijn et al. examined their self-disclosures (consistent with the view various combinations of traits (e.g., morally in- that positive things outnumber bad things), but corruptible plus clever, incorruptible plus stu- the negative emotion words had significantly pid, corrupt plus clever, and corrupt plus stupid) more impact on impressions. Specifically, the and assessed overall impressions. All of the more people used negative emotion words, the combinations, except the double-positive condi- less warm/likable and the less competent they tion, were more negative than a simple averag- were judged to be. Positive emotion words had ing model would have predicted. Thus, any bad no significant impact on either type of rating information carried a disproportionately stron- and, in fact, on ratings of dominance, positive ger impact than any good information. Another emotion words actually had a negative effect. way of describing their results is that they rep- Berry et al. speculated that the reason for the licated the diagnosticity effect but also showed discrepancy is that it is acceptable and even that the greater power of bad than good infor- expected for people to discuss positive feelings mation goes beyond issues of diagnosticity. during a first encounter, but speaking about Hiring and personnel decisions constitute an negative feelings is not expected and generates especially important sphere of impression for- a stronger reaction. mation, and it is one in which situational con- Thus, the greater power of bad than good tingencies probably underscore the greater im- information in forming impressions has been portance of bad information: It may be more well documented and recognized by research- costly to hire a bad, undesirable employee than ers. Multiple theories have been put forward to to reject a good, desirable one. Bolster and address this asymmetry, including expectations, Springbett (1961) studied how interviewers' memory, and category diagnosticity. Although 348 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS these theories can each explain a substantial (self-protection), and the other is to gain a good amount of the findings, the greater power of bad opinion of self (self-enhancement). If bad is than good information appears to survive even stronger than good, then the self-protective mo- when these explanations do not apply. tivation should be stronger than the self-en- hancement one. Self Self-concept theory has traditionally placed more emphasis on self-enhancement than on Self-concepts should seemingly be one self-protection, such as embodied in the concept sphere in which bad is not stronger than good. It of the self (a positive view of self) that is is well recognized that most people hold rather seen as the main motivator. Ogilvie (1987) sur- favorable opinions of themselves. Taylor and veyed psychology students and faculty as to Brown (1988) documented a substantial amount whether depended more on be- of evidence indicating that people think more coming like their ideal selves or becoming un- favorably of themselves than objective evidence like their undesired selves, and nearly 90% of warrants (see also Greenwald, 1980). Baumeis- both students and faculty said the desire to meet ter, Tice, and Hutton (1989) showed that self- one's positive ideals was stronger. Yet Ogil- esteem scores on all different scales tend to be vie's own data pointed strongly in the opposite distributed from very high to medium, with direction: The undesired self (operationally de- hardly any participants scoring in the truly low fined as "How I never to be") was a more self-esteem range. Other reviews have con- powerful motivator than the desired self. Gen- firmed that implausibly high majorities of peo- eral satisfaction in life had significant correla- ple consider themselves to be above average on tions with both closeness to the ideal self and various dimensions (see Gilovich, 1991). If bad closeness to the undesired self, but the latter performances carried greater weight in forming was significantly higher (for ideal self, r = .368; self-concepts, then presumably most people for undesired self, r = -.719). Regression anal- would regard themselves as below average yses suggested that the motivation to approach rather than above. one's ideals might even be derivative of the Yet perhaps a direct prediction that people motivation to avoid becoming one's undesired would have unfavorable self-concepts is unre- self. Ogilvie suggested that many people form alistic. It is generally agreed that people have their ideals precisely in response to their unde- strong motivations to maintain favorable con- sired selves. For example, Ogilvie described 1 cepts of themselves (e.g., Banaji & Prentice, participant who said his most undesired self was 1994; Baumeister, 1998; Sedikides, 1993). to be dependent, needy, and selfish and who Hence, it is likely that they exert themselves to correspondingly erected ideals for himself to be prevent bad information and bad experiences unselfishly helpful to others. "It is likely that his from producing an unfavorable self-concept. ideal self was derived from his undesired self Thus, bad information could actually have and not vice versa, and it is suspected that this greater power than good, without necessarily is the normal course of events" (Ogilvie, 1987, resulting in a bad self-concept—provided that p. 384). people's responses to bad experiences or threat- The distinction between protection and en- ening information are capable of discounting hancement was also made by Baumeister et al. any implications about the self. This was a (1989) with regard to individual differences in central thrust of Taylor's (1991) paper, which self-esteem and self-presentational motivations. recognized the power of bad feedback but pro- They concluded that people with low self-es- posed that minimization processes selectively teem are primarily concerned with self-protec- discredit and erase the negative implications for tion, consistent with the view of the greater self. power of bad events. In contrast, however, These arguments suggest a way to reformu- Baumeister et al. concluded that people with late the question of whether bad is stronger than high self-esteem are oriented toward self-en- good with respect to the self. The strong moti- hancement, which seemingly suggests the op- vation to have a good rather than a bad opinion posite motivational pattern (of greater concern of self can be decomposed into two strivings: with good than bad). Yet the self-enhancement one of which is to avoid a bad opinion of self orientation of people with high self-esteem does BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 349 not actually indicate an indifference to bad out- one recognizes the value of self-handicapping comes or failure. If anything, people with high for protecting against bad outcomes, whereas self-esteem show even more dramatic and strik- the value for enhancing good outcomes is con- ing responses to failure than people with low fined to people with high self-esteem (who do self-esteem (e.g., Baumeister & Tice, 1985; not much about failure anyway). The Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1993; McFar- more widespread appeal of self-protection is lin & Blascovich, 1981). The difference appears consistent with the view that bad is stronger to be that people with high self-esteem do not than good. worry much about failure or rejection because Likewise, self-serving biases can operate ei- they do not expect these to happen. Their highly ther to protect against bad outcomes or to en- favorable expectations account for the surpris- hance good ones, but, again, some evidence ing discrepancy between seeming disregard of points to greater power and pervasiveness of possible future failure and strong and distraught self-protection, suggesting that people are more reactions when they actually receive failure motivated to avoid the bad than to embrace the feedback (Blaine & Crocker, 1993). good. Distortion of information in a self-serving The distribution of self-esteem scores may be bias was studied by Klein (1992), and he found relevant. As Baumeister et al. (1989) noted, that biases were stronger in connection with bad participants scoring above the median in self- than good things. In an initial pair of studies, esteem do actually have high self-esteem scores students were asked to estimate how often they in an absolute sense, so it is plausible that they engaged in positive health-related behaviors do not spend much time worrying about possi- (e.g., eating fruit, brushing teeth, and eating ble bad outcomes. In contrast, participants scor- vitamins) and negative health-related behaviors ing below the median (thus low in self-esteem) (e.g., sunbathing, driving in bad weather, and typically have scores that are medium in self- eating salty foods). They also estimated how esteem, in absolute terms, indicating that they often their peers performed the same behaviors. have roughly comparable familiarity with suc- There was ample evidence of self-serving bias: cess and failure. Thus, when both success and On average, students estimated that they per- failure are familiar, bad is stronger than good, formed the good acts more often, and the bad and only the people who rarely encounter fail- acts less often, than their peers. For present ure (according to their and perception, purposes, the relevant point is that Klein found anyway) disdain self-protection. greater bias in connection with the bad than the A direct test of the relative power of the two good behaviors. In fact, in the second study, the motivations was undertaken by Tice (1991). bias (i.e., the difference between self and peer She used the motivated pattern of self-handi- estimates) reached significance for the bad be- capping, a strategic behavior that consists of haviors but not for the good ones. In a third creating obstacles to one's own performance, study, Klein used the same behavior (eating such as inadequate practice or alcohol impair- raisins) and presented it as either a healthful or ment (Jones & Berglas, 1978). In principle, an unhealthful behavior. When it was presented self-handicapping can both enhance success as health enhancing, because of the high vita- (e.g., succeeding despite minimal practice is min content of raisins, students claimed to eat doubly impressive) and protect against failure more raisins than their peers, but when it was (e.g., failing after inadequate practice is no dis- presented as unhealthful, because of a high sul- grace). Although Tice's findings confirmed the fur content of raisins, students estimated that general hypothesis that low self-esteem people would self-handicap for self-protection while they ate fewer raisins than their peers. (Control high self-esteem people would do it for self- participants, for whom eating raisins was not enhancement, the self-protection pattern was presented as either healthful or unhealthful, stronger overall. For example, the self-protec- showed no bias either way.) For present pur- tive benefits of self-handicapping were en- poses, the most relevant finding was that the dorsed by participants at both high and low positive bias was weaker than the negative bias. levels of self-esteem, whereas the self-enhanc- All these findings point to the conclusion that ing benefits were endorsed only by participants avoiding the bad is a stronger motivation than with high self-esteem. Put another way, every- embracing the good. 350 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

More generally, people seem to show more The distinction between self-enhancement self-favoring biases for negative than for posi- and self-protection has been recast by Higgins tive behaviors. Hoorens (1996) reviewed multi- (1987, 1996) as a distinction between preven- ple studies showing this pattern, which is to say tion and promotion. In Higgins's view, the self that people seek to avoid bad traits more than has some goals that involve striving toward they seek to claim good traits. Hoorens's (1995) positive ideals and others that involve prevent- earlier work found a contrary pattern, in which ing the self from misdeeds, which he discusses participants claimed to possess more good and in terms of "ought" goals. Direct comparison of fewer bad traits than the average person, so the these two was recently undertaken by Shah, effect is not unanimous, but the contrary find- Higgins, Friedman, and Kruglanski (1999). ings are often confounded. Thus, Hoorens's They found that the positive goals or ideals (1995) results were confounded by differential were more substitutable than the negative or base rates: The rates of endorsement of bad ought goals, which is another way of attesting to traits were relatively low for both self and the the greater importance of the bad. That is, if average person, so there was relatively little people refuse to accept a substitute for a partic- statistical room for the denial of bad traits to ular goal, it seems fair to assume that that goal emerge. is more important than another goal for which Personal was also studied by Hoo- they will readily accept an alternative. In the rens (1995) by having participants rate the rel- study by Shah et al., participants performed two ative likelihood that various positive and nega- tasks, which were both framed as ideals, both as tive events would happen to them, as opposed to oughts, or one of each. When both were framed being likely to happen to the average person of as ideals, then success on one reduced effort on their same age, sex, and school. The motiva- the second, whereas failure on the first led to tional bias fit the view that bad is stronger than increased effort on the second—consistent with good: Hoorens found that personal optimism the view that people believed success on one was more pronounced with regard to bad events would substitute for nonsuccess on the other. In than good events. In other words, participants contrast, when both were framed as oughts (or underestimated their own chances of having when they were mixed), there was no evidence various bad experiences (relative to the average of substitutability, in the sense that there was no person) more strongly than they overestimated effect for feedback on the first task on effort on their chances of having various good experiences. the second. In performance settings, self-enhancement A conceptual replication of this pattern was and self-protection are often indistinguishable. done by Liberman, Chen, and Higgins (1999; Doing one's best accomplishes both the goal of cited by Shah et al., 1999). In that study, par- avoiding failure and securing success. Only a ticipants were interrupted and prevented from few studies have effectively sought to separate completing a first task and later given the op- these motivations, but they too confirm that bad portunity to do another task or to resume work is stronger than good. Goodhart (1986) had peo- on the same task. When both tasks were framed ple engage in either positive or negative think- as ideals, they were willing to move to the new ing prior to an achievement task. These as- task, consistent with a substitutability interpre- signed thinking strategies involved recalling tation. In contrast, when both tasks were oughts, oneself being in a situation in which one might participants wanted only to resume the old task, have the assigned series of thoughts, such as presumably because the new task was not seen "Deep down I think I'm a pretty competent as a substitute. Thus, this line of work suggests person" (positive) or "No matter how hard I try, that preventing one bad outcome is not an ade- I just can't seem to grasp certain things" (neg- quate substitute for preventing another bad out- ative). They were then given an anagrams task. come, whereas reaching one good outcome is The negative thinking led to better performance often an acceptable substitute for another. on the test. Obviously, this does not reflect any The relative motivational power of good and direct self-suggestion or self-fulfilling prophecy bad traits can also be examined in indirect tac- (because the results point in the opposite direc- tics. Indirect tactics of self-enhancement and tion). Goodhart concluded that the negative protection were studied by Cialdini and his col- thoughts evoked more powerful motivations leagues. The best known of these is probably than the positive thoughts. that of basking in reflected glory (Cialdini et al., BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 351

1976), by which people link themselves to suc- to bad feedback as more potent. For example, cessful others and successful groups. These some of the data on reacting to daily events are studies, however, relied on the procedure of probably mediated by feedback received during ascertaining how much students identified with events, and the finding that bad days have more their university (such as by wearing school col- lasting impact than good days is probably a sign ors) following victories versus defeats by the that bad feedback is stronger. Likewise, the football team, so it is plausible that the effects more widespread use of self-handicapping for were mainly due to efforts to distance oneself self-protection than self-enhancement (Tice, from the unsuccessful team (rather than linking 1991) suggests that people are more concerned oneself to the successful team). about avoiding bad feedback than about maxi- A more rigorous follow-up study was there- mizing good feedback, which points to a greater fore done by Cialdini and Richardson (1980), motivational power of bad feedback. who explicitly distinguished between "basking Self-enhancement and self-protective strate- and blasting" (p. 406). In that study, basking gies were studied by Agostinelli, Sherman, referred to enhancing the positivity of one's Preston, and Chassin (1992). Specifically, these own university, whereas blasting referred to authors examined whether people would re- derogating a rival university, and both tenden- spond to feedback by perceiving failure as rel- cies were assessed as responses to personal crit- atively common and perceiving success as rel- icism in the form of failure feedback on a cre- atively uncommon. Both distortions benefit the ativity test. Thus, basking invokes the good, self, regardless of whether the self succeeds or whereas blasting invokes the bad. Across two fails, because the self s success gains in prestige studies, Cialdini and Richardson found the by being seen as relatively special; whereas the blasting effect to be consistently stronger, and, self s failure loses its stigma if many other in fact, the basking effect did not reach signif- people fail, too. Participants in their study re- icance in either study (unlike the blasting ef- ceived success, failure, or no feedback about fect). Thus, the tendency to depict one's rival their performance on a decision-making prob- university as bad was stronger than the tendency lem; they were then given measures of how to describe one's own university as good. The other people would likely do. Biases in judg- implication is that the motivation to avoid the ment were stronger following failure than suc- bad is more powerful than the motivation to cess (as compared with the no-feedback con- embrace the good, which is precisely what one trol): After failure, people rated failure as more would expect if bad is stronger than good. common and likely but success as rarer in the Thus, multiple lines of evidence suggest that general population. Success, in contrast, yielded bad is stronger than good with regard to the no departures from the control group. Thus, self-concept, even though the simple fact of participants were more affected by bad than positively inflated self-appraisals might give the good outcomes, and their responses suggested opposite impression. The positivity of self-con- stronger motivations to protect the self against cepts reflects the combined motivational effects failure than to amplify or enhance the impact of of self-protection (avoiding the bad) and self- success. enhancement (embracing the good). In many Students' reactions to feedback from teachers cases, such as a simple desire to do well, these were studied by Coleman, Jussim, and Abraham two motivations operate in tandem. When they (1987). Bad feedback had a stronger effect on can effectively be separated, though, the weight the students' of their own perfor- of the evidence suggests that people are more mance than good feedback. Bad feedback was strongly motivated to avoid bad views of self also seen as more indicative of the teachers' true than to claim good ones. evaluations, although not surprisingly students regarded the good feedback as more accurate Feedback than the bad. Reactions to social feedback of acceptance The relative power of good versus bad feed- and rejection were studied by Leary, Tambor, back is yet another sphere in which to test Terdal, and Downs (1995). Participants were whether bad is generally stronger than good. told that they either had been selected by other Some researchers have reviewed, as discussed members to be included in a group or excluded in preceding sections, work that already points from it or had been randomly assigned to be 352 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

included or excluded. Only the intentional re- that participants remembered more positive jection led to a change in self-esteem (and a than negative feedback, overall, although the corresponding change in ratings of other partic- effects were strongest when they either ex- ipants). Acceptance did not have an effect. In pected success or had had a recent success another study, Leary et al. provided participants experience. with specific individual feedback indicating that As we noted with self, however, the memory another person who had listened to their self- trace or net result can be biased in favor of disclosures did or did not (a) like them, (b) positive feedback, even if bad feedback is stron- accept them, or (c) desire to meet them. The ger, because the bad feedback is processed in a rejection feedback resulted in self-esteem scores more biased and hostile fashion. Baumeister that were significantly lower than the individu- and Cairns (1992) examined how individuals als' own pretest self-esteem, but no feedback processed and remembered bad feedback, with and the positive (acceptance) feedback failed to special attention paid to repressors (who are produce any significant change in self-esteem. most likely to show defensive or self-deceptive Thus, bad feedback was clearly stronger be- responses in the relatively mild context of a cause it alone had a significant effect. laboratory study). Bad feedback elicited clear The role of counterfactuals in responding to defensive responses during encoding, and these borderline feedback was explored by Medvec defenses ranged from avoiding exposure to and Savitsky (1997). They compared partici- elaborating it with refutational thoughts. Re- pants who had just barely made it into a desir- pressors recalled the good feedback better than able grade category (e.g., getting the lowest the bad feedback overall, although a slight re- possible "A") against those who had just barely versal was found among nonrepressors. In this missed it (e.g., getting the highest possible "B"). study, moreover, feedback was mixed to vary- Satisfaction was high among participants who ing degrees, so even the good feedback condi- had just made the category and low among tion contained some bad feedback, and vice those who had just missed it, and the borderline versa. The highest memory scores in the entire status enhanced these reactions. Thus, those experiment were obtained among repressors for who barely missed getting an A were more the small amount of bad feedback embedded in distraught and engaged in more counterfactuals the generally good feedback. (The next highest than those who missed getting an A by a wide was nonrepressors in that same condition.) In- margin. For present purposes, the important consistency and salience no contributed finding was that the effects of just missing a to these high memory scores, but inconsistency category were stronger than the effects of just and salience should also have operated to im- making it. Medvec and Savitsky interpreted this prove memory for small bits of praise embed- discrepancy in relation to (Kah- ded in the generally bad feedback; there was not neman & Tversky, 1979), which holds that much evidence of this. The explanation is ap- losses have more impact than comparably sized parently that when feedback is generally good, gains in economic decision making; in other people let their defenses down, whereupon any words, bad is stronger than good. small bits of criticism emerge as extremely powerful and are therefore remembered excep- The picture becomes more complicated with tionally well. Put another way, bad is clearly regard to memory, because the defensive pro- stronger than good when the defenses are down. cesses may succeed in suppressing memory for unwelcome feedback. Indeed, Kuiper and Derry Taken together, these studies suggest greater (1982) found that participants were less likely to impact and power for bad than good feedback. remember bad than good trait words after they The main limitation is that defensive responses had merely been asked whether the words de- sometimes succeed in miminizing the long-term scribed them, which shows a memory bias impact of bad feedback. When these defenses against unwelcome views of self even when are not operating, however, bad feedback is these were not feedback but merely questions. stronger than good. Moreover, the greater and (Depressed individuals did not have the same more pervasive efforts to minimize bad feed- bias, however.) Hence, findings of selective for- back than to maximize good feedback reflect a getting of bad feedback should not be surpris- motivational asymmetry that also recognizes ing. Mischel, Ebbesen, and Zeiss (1976) found bad feedback as more important than good. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 353

Health In other words, bad events impair the body's protective system, but good events do not The importance of physical health makes it a boost it. desirable sphere in which to consider the rela- A different method of reducing stress is to tive importance of good versus bad outcomes. increase social support. However, evidence Although we have not found a great deal of from controlled studies on the advantageous evidence, there are some findings that fit the effects of social support is also limited. One idea that bad is stronger than good. study found that residents in a geriatric home A review of human psychoneuroimmunology who were visited three times per week by col- and the biological and environmental factors lege students showed no change in cellular im- suggested that bad events have greater impact mune functioning (Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser, Wil- than good ones (Cohen & Herbert, 1996). Nu- liger, Stout, & Messick, 1985). In another study, merous studies have reported the deleterious Arnetz, Wasserman, Petrini, Brenner, and Levi effects of psychological and physical stress on (1987) examined the effect of social support on immune status. For instance, Glaser, Rice, lymphocyte proliferation. Swedish women who Sheridan, Fertel, and Stout (1987) and Kiecolt- had been unemployed for more than 9 months Glaser et al. (1984) have investigated the effects were given both emotional and informational of medical school examinations as a form of support (e.g., giving them information on get- on the immune functioning ting another job). However, this intervention of medical school students. Relative to a low- was not successful in boosting immune stress time (e.g., immediately after vacation), functioning. students' immune systems are significantly In contrast, a lack of social support and lone- compromised by the presence of psychological liness have been shown to have a variety of stress. Psychological stress results in decreased damaging health consequences. Kiecolt-Glaser activity of the natural killer cells, which protect et al. (1984) found that medical students who the body against disease (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., reported high levels of loneliness had weaker 1984). Stress also increases the proliferation of immune functioning than students who did not lymphocyte production (e.g., Glaser et al., report high levels of loneliness. Similarly, psy- 1987) and heightens the production of herpes chiatric patients who reported high levels of viruses antibodies (e.g., Glaser et al., 1987). The loneliness also had depressed immune systems. effects of negative events such as stress on the In summary, various studies and reviews of body appear to be not only consistent but also the immunology literature indicate that bad is swift. In a study of immune cell levels and stronger than good. In particular, researchers functioning, Herbert, Cohen, Marsland, Bachen, have found that stress and the absence of social and Rabin (1994) found weakened immune pa- support are reliably associated with immuno- rameters as soon as 5 min after the induction of suppression, whereas their opposites—relax- the stressor. ation and increases in social support—do not Given that stressful events happen to every- seem to have beneficial effects. one at some point, researchers have sought to Optimism and were examined by assess whether techniques would Schulz, Bookwala, Knapp, Scheier, and Wil- yield benefits to physiology comparable to the liamson (1996) in an effort to predict the mor- harm caused by stress. Thus far, the answer tality of cancer patients. Across 8 months, 70 of appears to be no. There has only been one study the 238 patients in a radiation therapy sample to assess immune functioning after a stress- died. Using Scheier and Carver's (1985) Life reduction intervention in the presence of a Orientation Test, Schulz et al. assessed both stressful event (Kiecolt-Glaser, Glaser, Strain, optimism and pessimism traits. Optimism failed Stout, & Tarr, 1986). These researchers found to predict survival, either alone or in interaction that training medical students in relaxation tech- with age. Pessimism, however, did yield a sig- niques did not affect the immune changes that nificant prediction of mortality, although only occurred as the result of stressful first-year ex- for the youngest (30-59) age range. (Thus, the ams. Cohen and Herbert (1996) concluded that only significant predictor was pessimism inter- there is little evidence for the benefits of stress- acting with age.) Although the results are cor- reduction techniques on immunological health. relational, the longitudinal prediction does en- 354 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS hance the plausibility that the trait caused the increases in the number of references to positive survival outcome rather than vice versa. The emotion across the multiple sessions of the implication is that the negative thoughts and study (which seemingly should be a sign of feelings associated with pessimism had a stron- improvement) failed to show a relative im- ger effect on mortality outcomes than the posi- provement in health. Pennebaker concluded that tive thoughts and feelings that characterize the participants who consistently expressed the optimism. most anxiety, sadness, and other negative feel- A similar conclusion emerged from a longi- ings were the ones who subsequently showed tudinal study by Robinson-Whelen, Kim, Mac- the greatest gains in health. Callum, and Kiecolt-Glaser (1997). Pessimism, Thus far we have considered health as a de- not optimism, uniquely predicted psychological pendent variable, but it can also be considered and physical health outcomes, 1 year later. as an independent variable (although, again, More precisely, pessimism during Year 3 sig- most work remains correlational). The effects of nificantly predicted anxiety, stress, and self- health on happiness and subjective well-being rated health (but not depression) in Year 4. In have been studied by several researchers. They contrast, optimism during Year 3 did not make believe health has a large impact on happiness a significant contribution to predicting any of (e.g., Diener, 1984), but the actual links tend to the outcomes in Year 4. Although the data are be quite weak across the population. One large correlational, the longitudinal design makes it and thorough study concluded that health is likely that the causal relationship went from irrelevant to happiness, except for older adults pessimism to the health outcome rather than the and chronically ill people (Campbell, Converse, reverse. & Rodgers, 1976). The exceptions may help A very different approach has been taken by explain the seemingly mistaken perception that Pennebaker and his colleagues (Francis & Pen- health is extremely important for happiness. nebaker, 1992; Greenberg & Stone, 1992; Pen- When health is bad, it does have a major impact nebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, Kiecolt- on happiness, but variations in good health have Glaser, & Glaser, 1988) in a program of re- small or negligible effects. Put another way, the search on how writing about traumatic personal difference between being moderately sick and experiences can affect subsequent health. In very sick is relatively powerful, whereas the these studies, participants are typically asked to corresponding difference between being moder- write about "the most traumatic experience of ately well and very well has little impact, so your entire life," whereas control group partic- health mainly affects happiness when health is ipants write about plans for the day, going to bad. Thus, health too conforms to the pattern in , or minor traumas. People who write which bad is stronger than good. about their most traumatic experiences typically show significant improvements in physical General Discussion health, as compared with the control group, on measures such as visits to the medical centers, The principle that bad is stronger than good immune system function, and sick days. In an appears to be consistently supported across a attempt to see what aspects of stories might broad range of psychological phenomena. The predict (and possibly cause or mediate) these quantity and strength of the evidence were not subsequent improvements, Pennebaker (1993) consistent and in fact varied widely from one subjected the essays from several previous in- topic to another. The breadth and convergence vestigations to linguistic analysis and then of evidence, however, across different areas checked these against the data on health out- were striking, which forms the most important comes. Participants whose essays had contained evidence. In no area were we able to find a more words referring to negative, unpleasant consistent reversal, such that one could draw a emotions showed significantly greater improve- firm conclusion that good is stronger than bad. ment than those who used fewer such words. This failure to find any substantial contrary pat- Use of words referring to positive emotions had, terns occurred despite our own wishes and ef- if anything, the opposite effect (and in any case, forts. We had hoped to identify several contrary the effect for positive emotions was weaker). patterns, which would have permitted us to de- Even those participants who showed the biggest velop an elaborate, complex, and nuanced the- BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 355 ory about when bad is stronger versus when embrace the good. Bad stereotypes and reputa- good is stronger. The most we can say is that tions are easier to acquire, and harder to shed, occasionally other psychological patterns will than good ones. Bad feedback has stronger ef- override the greater strength of bad things, and fects than good feedback. Bad health has a the greater strength of bad varies with respect to greater impact on happiness than good health, size, amount of evidence, and methodological and health itself is more affected by pessimism strength of evidence. However, the greater (the presence or absence of a negative outlook) strength of bad was apparent nearly every- than optimism (the presence or absence of a where. Hence, we must conclude that bad is positive outlook). stronger than good at a pervasive, general level. Convergence is also provided by Rozin and Let us briefly summarize the evidence. In Royzman (in press). Quite independently of this everyday life, bad events have stronger and project, these authors reviewed the literature on more lasting consequences than comparable interactions between good and bad, and they too good events. Close relationships are more concluded that bad things generally prevail. Our deeply and conclusively affected by destructive review has emphasized independent, parallel ef- actions than by constructive ones, by negative fects of good and bad factors, whereas theirs communications than positive ones, and by con- emphasized good and bad factors competing flict than harmony. Additionally, these effects directly against each other in the same situation extend to marital satisfaction and even to the (such as contagion). Both approaches have con- relationship's survival (vs. breakup or divorce). firmed the greater power of bad factors. Even outside of close relationships, unfriendly Thus, the greater impact of bad than good is or conflictual interactions are seen as stronger extremely pervasive. It is found in both cogni- and have bigger effects than friendly, harmoni- tion and motivation; in both inner, intrapsychic ous ones. Bad moods and negative emotions processes and in interpersonal ones; in connec- have stronger effects than good ones on cogni- tion with decisions about the future and to a tive processing, and the bulk of affect regulation limited extent with memories of the past; and in efforts is directed at escaping from bad moods animal learning, complex human information (e.g., as opposed to entering or prolonging good processing, and emotional responses. moods). That suggests that people's desire to get out of a bad mood is stronger than their Searching for Exceptions desire to get into a good one. The preponder- ance of words for bad emotions, contrasted with Given the scope and variety of the evidence, the greater frequency of good emotions, sug- the appropriate question to ask is not whether gests that bad emotions have more power. Some bad is generally stronger than good but rather, patterns of learning suggest that bad things are how general or universal is this pattern? When more quickly and effectively learned than cor- we began this review, we anticipated finding responding good things. The lack of a positive some exceptions that would demarcate the lim- counterpart to the concept of trauma is itself a its of the phenomenon. Although a few isolated sign that single bad events often have effects studies have deviated from the general pattern, that are much more lasting and important than we were unable to locate any significant spheres any results of single good events. Bad parenting in which good was consistently stronger than can be stronger than genetic influences; good bad. At most, the greater power of bad can parenting is not. Research on social support has occasionally be overridden, such as when pos- repeatedly found that negative, conflictual be- itive information is made to be more diagnostic haviors in one's social network have stronger than negative information (Skowronski & Carls- effects than positive, supportive behaviors. Bad ton, 1989, 1992)—but even in this instance, the things receive more attention and more thor- greater power of bad than good can be found ough cognitive processing than good things. lurking in the background (Martijn et al., 1992). When people first learn about one another, bad information has a significantly stronger impact The closest to a general reversal was in an- on the total impression than any comparable ticipation of future events, insofar as prevailing good information. The self appears to be more optimism about the future reflects a greater strongly motivated to avoid the bad than to power of good future events (e.g., Weinstein, 1980). Even this pattern, however, did not con- 356 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS stitute a reliable exception. When people are pressed, so it does not really indicate that the making decisions about specific, impending bad experiences had lesser power. The very events, they seem more motivated to avoid bad emergence of processes designed to suppress outcomes than to pursue good ones, at least in unpleasant memories can be regarded as a tes- many cases in which the magnitude of the two timonial to the power of bad experiences. outcomes has been carefully calibrated to be the There was also some evidence that positive same (as the gambling studies showed). and negative events have differential effects on A related pattern showing a preference for memory. Some researchers have found that peo- good is the so-called "pollyanna hypothesis," ple remember pleasant events better than un- which suggests that people are biased toward pleasant events (e.g., Brewer, 1988; Holmes, more positive ideas and conclusions. Boucher 1970). However, we found as many or more and Osgood (1969) observed that "there is a studies indicating that negative events leave a universal human tendency to use evaluatively longer and more lasting mark on memory (e.g., positive (E+) words more frequently ... than Banaji & Hardin, 1994; Skowronski & Carl- evaluatively negative words (E-)" (p. 1). Simi- ston, 1987; see the Memory section in this arti- larly, Matlin and Stang (1978) observed that cle). Although our search did yield some mixed negative words consist more often of a positive evidence on the effects of bad versus good on root that becomes negative by a prefix (e.g., memory, the overall consensus was that, at least unpleasant) than the reverse. Likewise, when in the short term, bad has a greater impact on people are instructed to attribute traits to a target memory (e.g., Bless et al., 1992; Dreben et al., person, they tend to assign more positive than 1979); with time, it seems that there exist cog- negative ones, with approximate proportions of nitive operations to reduce the longevity of this 62% positive and 38% negative (e.g., Adams- effect (e.g., Walker et al., 1997). Webber, 1977; Benjafield, 1984; Benjafield & There are individual differences in the degree Adams-Webber, 1976; Tuohy & Stradling, to which people are oriented toward good ver- 1987). Still, such findings are not really contrary sus bad. Nondepressed people seem to seek out evidence, and, in fact, they may help perpetuate positive information and avoid negative infor- the greater power of bad by keeping it in the mation more than depressed ones, as noted in minority so that it remains more salient (e.g., several spheres. These include optimism regard- Berlyne, 1971). One could also suggest that the ing the future (Taylor & Brown, 1988) and preference for positive words and positive traits biased recall for positive information (Matt et makes the greater power of bad ones especially al., 1992). There are also repressors who sys- remarkable because it must overcome bias. Our tematically ignore negative information about view is simply that the greater frequency of the self (e.g., Baumeister & Cairns, 1992). Like- good is the natural complement to the greater wise, there are well-established individual dif- power of bad: Good can only match or over- ferences in general tendencies toward approach come bad by strength of numbers. and avoidance motivation (Elliot & Covington, The memory literature also yielded several 2001) that may be linked to the relative re- findings demonstrating a reversal of the bad is sponse to bad and good stimuli. These excep- stronger than good pattern. This reversal ap- tions seem, however, to reflect preference for pears to be driven by two distinct processes: a good over bad rather than subjective impact, self-enhancement effect whereby negative memo- and many of those individuals are actually ries were suppressed or positive memories ac- strongly affected by bad events when they do cessed, and a mood congruency whereby non- confront them. The individuals for whom good depressed individuals (the majority) showed a is actually stronger than bad constitute a small tendency for recalling information that was pos- and atypical minority. itively valenced and thus matched their current Another factor to consider is the possibility mood. At least in memory, the bad is stronger that overall bad outweighs good (i.e., there is a than good effect will at times take a back seat to main effect for bad vs. good) but that the type of other psychological principles. Still, the occa- outcome may moderate the strength of the ef- sional finding of greater recall for positive ex- fect. That is, if the dependent measures are periences probably reflects a selective and mo- broken down into negative (e.g., judging how tivated process by which bad memories are sup- clumsy a target is) versus positive (e.g., judging BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 357 how graceful a target is), the bad and good will Is it adaptive? At the broadest level, we affect the positive measures, but only the bad argue that bad is stronger than good because will affect the negative measures. Although nu- responding to the world in this way is adaptive. merous studies in this review (e.g., Major et al., Generally, individuals who are attuned to 1997) showed this pattern, it was not consistent preventing and rectifying bad things should enough for us to pronounce this a true boundary flourish and thrive more than individuals ori- condition. However, the idea is intriguing and ented primarily toward maximizing good suggests directions for future research. For in- things. This argument is admittedly speculative. stance, in attempts to use a manipulation that The broadest argument we can devise is produces the strongest effects, researchers based on a change in motivational states in the would be wise to use something bad so as to presence of negative events, stimuli, and infor- influence both positive and negative outcomes. mation. When considering why bad outweighs The general lack of reliable counterexamples good, an intriguing possibility is that bad things has made it difficult to specify boundary condi- indicate a need for the self to change something tions on the general rule that bad is stronger about itself; that is, that bad things prompt self- than good. Indeed, when reviewing the evi- regulation. Through self-regulation, an organ- dence, we had hoped to find more exceptions, ism can adapt and change itself to fit its envi- reversals, moderator variables, and boundary ronment, a strategy that is adaptive, given that conditions. The presence of these factors would the organisms most likely to reproduce are those have made for a more sophisticated and nu- that can be flexible in the face of ever-changing anced theory as to why bad would be stronger circumstances. Rigid adherence to behavioral than good. Accordingly, the lack of these vari- patterns that were useful in the past is not ef- ables renders it somewhat difficult to formulate fective when met with new challenges and a theory that can account for such broad and threats. Thus, one of the best methods of in- consistent findings. The safest conclusion, then, creasing survival and gene transmission is to be is that the bad is stronger than good effect is a closely attuned to the current environmental robust and broad-level psychological principle contingencies. Moreover, changing the environ- that underlies a range of psychological phenom- ment to fit the self is neither effective nor prac- enon and operates in the company of a limited tical as a route to maximize evolutionary fitness. number of similarly broad principles. A related argument is that may be best facilitated by having bad events have a Revisiting Theory lasting impact while good events have a tempo- rary one. This too is based on the idea that bad We began this article by briefly suggesting events signal a need for change, whereas good that the relative strength of bad over good is an ones do not. If satisfaction and were adaptive response of the human organism to its permanent, there might be little incentive to physical and social environment. In view of continue seeking further benefits or advances. how pervasive the relative strength of bad is, it The ephemeral nature of good feelings may seems unlikely that this pattern is maladaptive. therefore stimulate progress (which is adaptive). In particular, we found that bad was stronger If bad feelings wore off, however, people might than good with regard to health, social support, repeat their mistakes, so genuine progress and learning—all of which are important would best be served by having the effects of spheres for adaptations. It seems especially un- bad events linger for a relatively long time. likely that maladaptive patterns would have re- Organisms require not only a system to signal mained powerful there. We also noted that peo- the need for change, but also one that commu- ple for whom good is stronger than bad (e.g., nicates quickly and intensely, with little energy people insensitive to or to ) seem or effort required and without awareness, be- prone to misfortunes and early deaths; this too is cause the necessary change may require swift consistent with the view that it is adaptive for responding. Empirical findings have demon- bad events to have greater power. We turn now strated that bad things satisfy these criteria. Re- to the question of why bad would be stronger search confirms that negative stimuli have than good across such diverse areas and with greater influence on neural responses than pos- such reliability. itive stimuli (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 358 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

1998); that negative traits, relative to positive whereas strengthening any one link (other than traits, have greater influence on the overall im- the weakest) or adding stronger links will have pression of another person (Peeters & Czapin- minimal effect on the chain's overall strength. ski, 1990); and that negative trait adjectives A final consideration is that bad has greater command more attention, at a nonconscious power because good entails consistency across level, than positive trait adjectives (Pratto & time and events, which cannot be created by a John, 1991). single good event but can be destroyed by a In summary, it may be that humans and ani- single bad one (see Rozin & Royzman, in mals show heightened awareness of and re- press). The importance of stability with regard sponded more quickly to negative information to good things may well have contributed to because it signals a need for change. Hence, the evolving a broad orientation to respond more adaptiveness of self-regulation partly lies in the strongly to bad than good. In a crucial sense, the organism's ability to detect when response stability argument is linked to the asymmetry of modifications are necessary and when they are life and death: The individual remains alive unnecessary. Moreover, the lessons learned after several years only if he or she managed to from bad events should ideally be retained per- survive every single day, and no degree of op- manently so that the same dangers or costs are timal experience on any given day can offset the not encountered repeatedly. Meanwhile, good effects of failing to survive on another. Individ- events (such as those that provide a feeling of uals who failed to emphasize the consistency satisfaction and ) should ideally and stability of good outcomes might well have wear off so that the organism is motivated to taken more extreme risks in pursuit of power- continue searching for more and better out- fully good outcomes and hence failed to survive comes. As a result, organisms that possess and reproduce. In this way, natural selection mechanisms for adept perception and process- would have shaped the human organism to give ing of negative cues will achieve greater fitness high priority to consistency and stability, which with the environment and, consequently, will in turn would foster the basic orientation that have a greater chance of surviving threats and bad is stronger than good. more successful reproductive attempts. In summary, the propensity to experience bad A related argument might be made on the as stronger than good may confer a significant basis of social (and biological) systems. In order adaptive advantage for individuals, such that for a system to function effectively, each com- those who mobilized their attention and re- ponent of the system must do its part. If one component breaks down, the entire system can sources toward the bad would be more likely to be disrupted. Hence, at the level of the individ- survive and reproduce. To see how life would ual on the system, bad is undeniably stronger be lived if bad were not stronger than good, we than good. Any individual part can prevent the can look to the rare individuals who are born system from functioning; but no individual part with a congenital insensitivity to pain. These can by itself cause the system to succeed. This individuals do experience pleasurable physical is especially true of social groups (or at least sensations to a relatively greater extent and in- those marked by division of labor): Water must tensity than negative ones. Yet they tend to die be found, food must be obtained and distrib- from physical mishaps stemming from their in- uted, predators must be kept away, and enemies ability to feel pain, with children reportedly must be intimidated or defeated. No one of biting off their fingers or tongues and those successes can ensure the group's survival, severe burns from contact with hot surfaces and but failure in any of those spheres can ensure its adults having to find substitute signals for pain. demise. Biological systems have similar prop- For example, one sufferer was reported to not erties, and if even one vital organ ceases to feel a ruptured appendix and therefore failed to function (heart, lungs, brain, stomach), the per- seek treatment in time; another suffered severe son will die. This concept was proposed under spinal deformations as a result of neglecting the name of the chain principle by Weinberg proper posture (Sternbach, 1968). Thus, as hu- (1975; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). A chain's mans, we are well served by having bad stron- efficacy depends on its weakest link, and weak- ger than good, on both a personal level and an ening any one link weakens the entire chain; evolutionary level. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 359

Insights from prior theory. Researchers this assessment is correct, however, it is con- concerned with impression formation have al- fined to the sphere of forming impressions of ready debated some of these theoretical issues newly met acquaintances, so something addi- because their area is the main one in which the tional would be needed if there is indeed a more predominant strength of the bad side has been general pattern in which bad is stronger than recognized (also known as the positive-nega- good. tive asymmetry). Kellermann (1984) examined Working from a perception background, the greater power of negativity in initial inter- Wright (1991) has proposed a "fundamental actions. She managed to articulate six different negative bias" (p. 471) in which perception will theories: the first three were based on the greater be guided more by negative than positive frequency of good than bad information, which events. She also proposed that this negativity makes bad information more salient and per- will carry over into the thoughts and feelings haps more powerful in other ways. As Keller- following the initial perception. Furthermore, mann noted, however, salience does not really she proposed that these effects are likely to be provide a full and satisfactory explanation, par- strongest to the extent that the stimulus is salient ticularly for laboratory experiments in which and the context is vague or sparse. A rich con- positive information is made equally salient. text may mitigate the effect of the stimulus, One might, however, revive this theory by pro- whereas salience should enhance it. We note, posing, at the broadest level, that life as a whole however, that if bad is indeed stronger than has more good than bad events, such that bad good, then it is plausible that a mitigating con- events will inevitably stand out (even if on a text might nullify the effects of good, positive local basis, such as in a given laboratory exper- information even more thoroughly than the ef- iment, their frequency is made comparable to fects of bad, negative information. In this sense, good events). One might even suggest that the the logic behind Wright's proposition is not lives of American and Western European citi- entirely persuasive. Then again, Wright might zens (from whom the majority of data are col- simply have meant that the differential impact lected) are exceptional in the disproportionately of negative information may be clearest when high frequency of good events, and that if re- all effects are strongest, which means in the searchers were to study people who live in absence of mitigating context. harsh, desperate times, individual good events Wright's (1991) account is thus again at best would be relatively rare and might therefore a partial explanation. If perception has a funda- have greater power by virtue of this salience. mental negative bias, then most other psycho- Another theory was that negative information logical phenomena will show the same asym- is actually more informative, insofar as it de- metry to the extent that they depend on percep- parts more from what is normative: People are tion. The perceptual asymmetry, however, supposed to behave well, and so bad acts defy requires explaining itself, so again we are left social and situational pressures and hence are searching for a more comprehensive explanation. presumably more revealing about the inner dis- The same problem is found in Maslow's positions of the actors (and therefore more (1968) motivational theories. Although he did likely to promote correspondent inferences; see not explicitly speak of the superior power of bad Jones & Davis, 1965). Extremity of information over good, he did propose that the most basic (Fiske, 1980) is also relevant because extremely and primary motivations involve escaping from positive information can also be quite informa- aversive states, such as hunger, deprivation, tive, so the informativeness hypothesis is a vari- cold, and danger. The more positive motiva- ation on the correspondent-inference theory. tions of seeking esteem, love, belongingness, Kellermann's (1984) review leaned toward fa- and self-actualization only begin to direct be- voring the view that bad information is more havior when the negative or deficiency (his informative (based on extremity and distance term) motives have been satisfied. As with from the average or ). Skowronski and Wright's (1991) perception-based theory, Carlston (1989) likewise favored the view that Maslow's motivation-based theory can effec- bad events carry more weight in forming im- tively explain why affect, cognition, and behav- pressions because they are more diagnostic of ior give precedence to escaping the bad, insofar the traits and dispositions of individuals. Even if as these responses depend on motivation. How- 360 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS ever, the reason for the motivational asymmetry fects on the negative, as opposed to positive, is simply postulated rather than explained. In motivational system. Accordingly, there is a our view, these patterns point back toward evo- steeper slope for the relationship between the lutionary selection. We have suggested that sur- activation and motivational response for nega- vival and reproduction (in K-selected species) tive stimuli. Several investigations have con- depend on giving priority to avoiding bad rather firmed this negativity bias (Bradley, Lang, & than pursuing good. If this argument is broadly Cuthbert, 1997; Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994; correct, it would hardly be surprising that the Ito et al., 1998). basic phenomena of perception and motivation In summary, it is apparent that prior work has would already show signs of this bias. contributed an important set of mid-level theo- A more sophisticated theoretical formulation ries about the relative power of good versus bad by Taylor (1991) is also relevant. Indeed, in her events. Taken alone, these formulations and in- article, she devoted some space to documenting sights do not provide a full accounting for why the greater power of negative than positive bad should be stronger than good as a general events. Taylor proposed that aversive events psychological principle. The most sophisticated produce complex cognitive and affective reac- theories about the asymmetry in impression for- tions that good, desirable events do not because mation appear to zero in on diagnosticity and the bad events present problems that require correspondence of inferences, which are spe- solving. One can thus ignore something good cific to impression formation and could not eas- more easily than something bad. In Taylor's ily apply, say, to taste aversion learning or account, bad events set off two relevant sets of trauma. We found that bad was stronger than responses: the first mobilizes resources to meet good in a remarkably broad and diverse set of the threat, and the second tries to minimize the phenomena. A specific or mid-level theory may damage or trauma afterward. In contrast, pleas- not be broad enough to account for it. Instead, it ant events can be quietly and passively enjoyed appears to be a basic, pervasive fact of psychol- without either the mobilization or the ogy that bad is stronger than good. minimization. Taylor's (1991) theory addresses a different Implications problem than the one with which we are con- cerned. The mobilization and minimization pat- The role of culture. Our review focused ex- terns she delineated could be entirely correct clusively on the individual's experience of bad even if good were stronger than bad. The extra and good and concluded that experiencing bad cognitive and affective work involved in re- as stronger than good is adaptive to the individ- sponding to bad events (as opposed to good ual. In other words, nature may have shaped the ones) would contribute something to the greater human psyche to treat bad as stronger than psychological impact of bad events, insofar as good. Culture, however, would not necessarily more effort may be required and more extensive have to conform to this. In fact, if one considers processing may leave clearer psychological the myths and ideals that cultures present, there traces (e.g., improving memory). Then again, to does not seem to be any clear message that bad the extent that the minimization process is suc- is stronger. cessful, the long-term impact of bad events may For example, is widely regarded as a turn out to be less than the impact of good supremely cultural phenomenon. In recent mil- events: People do not minimize good events, so lennia, religious ideas have emphasized salva- these may live on even as the psyche attempts tion as much as retribution (e.g., Eliade, 1982, to purge its memory of prior woes and 1985). Heaven and hell are equally extreme in misfortunes. the Christian tradition, and there seems little A motivational account of the differential basis for assuming that hell is in any sense more effects of bad versus good has been proposed by powerful or extreme than heaven. Indeed, in Cacioppo and colleagues (e.g., Cacioppo & most modern nations, belief in hell is signifi- Berntson, 1994; Cacioppo, Gardner, & Bernt- cantly less widespread than belief in heaven son, 1997). They proposed a negativity bias in (e.g., Aries, 1981), which might be construed as their model of evaluative space, such that com- indicating that the cultural ideas emphasize parable degrees of activation have greater ef- good more strongly than bad. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 361

Love has likewise received idealization in psyche has powerful mechanisms for retrospec- cultural mythology that has made of it a more tively minimizing bad experiences. Although extreme good than is empirically justified. both good and bad feelings may fade with time, Songs, films, novels, and wedding vows con- the bad ones are actively suppressed; whereas tinue to promise that love is forever, even the good memories may be cultivated and sus- though the statistics on divorce, marriage ther- tained (e.g., through reminiscence). By the apy, and infidelity indicate that it is not. In fact, same token, people may treat bad experiences Baumeister (1991) concluded that cultural ide- as isolated events while integrating good ones als of fulfillment have a general pattern of into an ongoing general perception of goodness. promising more permanence than is typically In this way, individuals may sustain a broadly found, whether these fulfillments involve love, favorable view of their lives. Something like happiness, spiritual enlightenment, fame and this must after all be operating in most mar- celebrity, , creativity, or others. riages, given that most people rate their mar- Thus, culture certainly presents individuals riages favorably, but half of marriages end in with mythical images of extreme possibilities in divorce. Probably they rate their marriage fa- both directions. Probably the reason for this is vorably (by regarding the problems as tempo- that these cultural myths are important means rary or exceptions) until they begin to contem- by which a society can motivate its individuals plate divorce seriously. to behave in socially desirable ways, and miti- These considerations are quite consistent gating the extremity of the myth would simply with the view that the good life consists of a weaken the motivations. In particular, culture consistent pattern of good outcomes, even if may find it optimal to encourage people to delay these are individually relatively small and weak. over periods that are far longer than A few bad outcomes can be minimized by mak- what prevailed in our evolutionary history. As ing external attributions or regarding them as just one example, the multiyear process of at- unimportant, thereby preserving the subjective tending college or graduate school is probably impression of a stable pattern of good out- best sustained by a positive image of how won- comes. As long as the individual perceives that derful life will be afterward, whereas nature has pattern of consistent goodness, life may seem few contingencies that require one to adopt such strongly good overall even if nothing strongly a long-range time perspective. good ever happens. Happiness. We have concluded that bad is Learning and child development. We have stronger than good, yet a wealth of data suggest also noted that certain areas are characterized by that life is good and people are largely happy a belief in the superior power of good. These (D. G. Myers, 1992). How can good overcome areas include learning and child development. the greater power of bad to make life seemingly We presented research earlier to suggest that so wonderful? There are several answers. such beliefs are mistaken. Specifically, punish- Good can overcome bad by force of numbers. ment produces faster learning than reward, and To maximize the power of good, these numbers bad parenting has a stronger effect than good must be increased. This can be done by creating parenting. Still, it is possible that some genuine more . For example, in a romantic rela- exceptions can be found in these areas. On the tionship each partner can make an effort to be other hand, it may be that ethical and practical nice to the other consistently. Such small acts of concerns are mainly responsible for the advo- are important for combating the bads cacy of reward instead of punishment. Any that will typically occur. Indeed, if Gottman seeming disadvantage of punishment (as com- (1994) is correct, the ratio should be at least five pared with reward) in promoting learning may goods for every bad. Likewise, individuals can arise because punishment has side effects that make an effort to recognize and appreciate the interfere with effective learning, so punishment goods that they have—celebrating each small may be quite strong in general. Ethical and success, being thankful for health, and having political concerns may make people reluctant to for supportive others. hit their children, and those individuals who do Another contributor to the perception of life hit may sometimes encounter and as good involves selective perception and mem- other long-term problems, but these concerns do ory. As Taylor (1991) argued, the human not prove that punishment is itself weak. In 362 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS other words, punishment may not be optimal for power of bad may itself be a good thing. More- education, even if it does produce optimal learn- over, good can still triumph in the end by force ing, because the side effects of punishment can of numbers. Even though a bad event may have be damaging. a stronger impact than a comparable good The question about punishment and learning event, many lives can be happy by virtue of raises a broader issue. To examine whether re- having far more good than bad events. ward or punishment promotes better learning is to look for only one kind of effect—in particu- References lar, a good one (insofar as learning is good). In a number of the studies we have reviewed here, Abbey, A., Abramis, D. J., & Caplan, R. D. (1985). researchers found that positive independent Effects of different sources of social support and variables affected positive dependent variables, social conflict on emotional well-being. Basic and whereas negative independent variables af- Applied Social Psychology, 6, 111-129. fected negative dependent variables—although Abele, A. (1985). Thinking about thinking: Causal, often the negative independent variables also evaluative, and finalistic cognitions about social affected the positive dependent variables. Put situations. European Journal of Social Psychol- more simply, good affects good, whereas bad ogy, 15, 315-332. affects both bad and good. If one were to look Acitelli, L. K., Douvan, E., & Veroff, J. (1993). Perceptions of conflict in the first year of marriage: only at good outcomes, however, one might How important are similarity and understanding? well often find that good and bad events have Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 10, roughly equal impact, and sometimes the good 5-19. events will show up as stronger. This would, Adams-Webber, J. (1977). The golden section and however, be a misleading conclusion caused by the structure of self-concepts. Perceptual and Mo- the one-sided focus on good outcomes. Only tor Skills, 45, 703-706. when the range of outcomes includes both good Afifi, W. A., & Burgoon, J. K. (2000). The impact of and bad ones, such as illness versus health, or a violations on uncertainty and the consequences for happy marriage versus a divorce, or liking ver- attractiveness. Human Communication Research, 26, sus disliking, can one claim to have provided a 203-233. full and balanced assessment of the relative Agostinelli, G., Sherman, S. J., Presson, C. C, & Chassin, L. (1992). Self-protection and self-en- power of good and bad causes. hancement biases in estimates of population prev- alence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulle- Concluding Remarks tin, 18, 631-642. Anderson, N. H. (1965). Averaging versus adding as In our review, we have found bad to be a stimulus-combination rule in impression forma- stronger than good in a disappointingly relent- tion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychol- less pattern. We hope that this article may stim- ogy, 2, 1-9. ulate researchers to search for and identify ex- Aries, P. (1981). The hour of our death. (H. Weaver, ceptions; that is, spheres or circumstances in Trans.). New York: Knopf. Arnetz, B. B., Wasserman, J., Petrini, B., Brenner, which good events outweigh bad ones. Given S. O., & Levi L. (1987). Immune function in the large number of patterns in which bad out- unemployed women. Psychosomatic Medicine, 49, weighs good, however, any reversals are likely 3-12. to remain as mere exceptions. The lack of ex- Aronson, E., & Under, D. (1965). Gain and loss of ceptions suggests how basic and powerful is the esteem as determinants of interpersonal attractive- greater power of bad. In our view, this differ- ness. Journal of Experimental Social Psychol- ence may be one of the most basic and far- ogy, 1, 156-171. reaching psychological principles. Atthowe, J. M (1960). Types of conflict and their Although it may seem pessimistic to con- resolution: A reinterpretation. Journal of Experi- clude that bad is stronger than good, we do not mental Psychology, 59, 1-9. Averill, J. R. (1980). On the paucity of positive think that such pessimism is warranted. As we emotions. In K. Blankstein, P. Pliner, & J. Polivy have suggested, there are several reasons to (Eds.), Advances in the study of communication think that it may be highly adaptive for human and affect (Vol. 6, p. 745). New York: Plenum. beings to respond more strongly to bad than Baeyens, F., Eelen, P., Van den Bergh, O., & Crom- good. In the final analysis, then, the greater bez, G. (1990). Flavor-flavor and color-flavor BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 363

conditioning in humans. Learning and Motiva- perception. Personality and Social Psychology tion, 21, 434-455. Bulletin, 23, 526-537. Banaji, M. R., & Hardin, C. (1994). Affect and mem- Birnbaum, M. H. (1972). Morality judgments: Test of ory in retrospective reports. In S. Sudman & N. an averaging model. Journal of Experimental Psy- Schwarz (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the chology, 93, 35-42. validity of retrospective reports. New York: Blaine, B., & Crocker, J. (1993). Self-esteem and Springer-Verlag. self-serving biases in reactions to positive and neg- Banaji, M. R., & Prentice, D. A. (1994). The self in ative events: An integrative review. In R. social contexts. In L. Porter & M. Rosenzweig Baumeister (Ed.), Self-esteem: The puzzle of low (Eds.), Annual Review of Psychology (Vol. 45, pp. self-regard (pp. 55-85). New York: Plenum. 297-332). Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews. Bless, H., Hamilton, D. L., & Mackie, D. M. (1992). Bartholow, B. D., Fabiani, M, Gratton, G., & Bet- Mood effects on the organization of person infor- tencourt, B. A. (1999). Gazing into the cognitive mation. European Journal of Social Psychol- toolbox: Expectancy violations and event-related ogy, 22, 497-509. brain potentials. Manuscript submitted for publi- Bolster, B. I., & Springbett, B. M. (1961). The reac- cation. tion of interviewers to favorable and unfavorable Baumeister, R. F. (1991). Meanings of life. New information. Journal of Applied Psychology, 45, York: Guilford Press. 97-103. Baumeister, R. F. (1998). The self. In D. T. Gilbert, Boucher, J., & Osgood, C. E. (1969). The Pollyanna S. T. Fiske, & G. Lindzey (Eds.), Handbook of hypothesis. Journal of Verbal Learning and Ver- social psychology (4th ed., pp. 680-740). New bal Behavior, 8, 1-8. York: McGraw-Hill. Bradley, M. M., Lang, P. J., & Cuthbert, B. N. (1997). Affective norms for English words. Gaines- Baumeister, R. F., & Cairns, K. J. (1992). Repression ville, FL: Center for the Study of Emotion and and self-presentation: When audiences interfere Attention—National Institute of Mental Health, with self-deceptive strategies. Journal of Person- University of . ality and Social Psychology, 62, 851-862. Brewer, W. F. (1988). Memory for randomly sam- Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. pled autobiographical events. In U. Neisser & E. (1993). When ego threats lead to self-regulation Winograd (Eds.), Remembering reconsidered: failure: Negative consequences of high self-es- Ecological and traditional approaches to the study teem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychol- of memory (pp. 21-90). Cambridge, England: ogy, 64, 141-156. Cambridge University Press. Baumeister, R. F., Heatherton, T. F., & Tice, D. M. Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic (1994). Losing control: How and why people fail and planning the good society. In M. H. at self-regulation. San Diego, CA: Academic Appley (Ed.), Adaptation level theory: A sympo- Press. sium (pp. 287-302). New York: Academic Press. Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is a fundamental human motivation. Psychological happiness relative? Journal of Personality and So- Bulletin, 117, 497-529. cial Psychology, 36, 917-927. Baumeister, R. F., & Tice, D. M. (1985). Self-esteem Brown, J. S. (1940). Generalized approach and and responses to success and failure: Subsequent avoidance responses in relation to conflict behav- performance and intrinsic motivation. Journal of ior. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale Uni- Personality, 53, 450-467. versity. Baumeister, R. F., Tice, D. M., & Hutton, D. G. Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (1994). Relation- (1989). Self-presentational motivations and per- ship between attitudes and evaluative space: A sonality differences in self-esteem. Journal of Per- critical review, with emphasis on the separability sonality, 57, 547-579. of positive and negative substrates. Psychological Benjafield, J. (1984). On the relation between the Bulletin, 115, 401-423. Pollyanna and golden section hypotheses. British Cacioppo, J. T., Gardner, W. L., & Berntson, G. G. Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 83-84. (1997). Beyond bipolar conceptualizations and Benjafield, J., & Adams-Webber, J. (1976). The measures: The case of attitudes and evaluative golden section hypothesis. British Journal of Psy- space. Personality and Social Psychological Re- chology, 67, 11-15. view, 1, 3-25. Berlyne, D. E. (1971). Aesthetics and psychobiology. Cahill, C, Llewelyn, S. P., & Pearson, C. (1991). New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Long-term effects of sexual abuse which occurred Berry, D. S., Pennebaker, J. W., Mueller, J. S., & in childhood: A review. British Journal of Clinical Hiller, W. S. (1997). Linguistic bases of social Psychology, 30, 117-130. 364 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

Campbell, A., Converse, P. E., & Rodgers, W. L. David, J. P., Green, P. J., Martin, R., & Suls, J. (1976). The quality of American life: Perceptions, (1997). Differential roles of neuroticism, extraver- evaluations, and satisfactions. New York: Russell sion, and event desirability for mood in daily life: Sage. An integrative model of top-down and bottom-up Carlson, E. R. (1966). The affective tone of psychol- influences. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- ogy. Journal of General Psychology, 75, 65-78. chology, 73, 149-159. Cassirer, E. (1955). The of symbolic Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psycholog- forms: Vol. 1. Language. Yale University Press. ical Bulletin, 95, 542-575. (Original work published 1921) Diener, E., Larsen, R. J., Levine, S., & Emmons, Cialdini, R. B., Borden, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, R. A. (1985). Intensity and frequency: Dimensions M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Bask- underlying positive and negative affect. Journal of ing in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Personality and Social Psychology, 48, 1253-1265. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, Dreben, E. K., Fiske, S. T., & Hastie, R. (1979). The 366-375. independence of evaluative and item information: Cialdini, R. B., & Richardson, K. D. (1980). Two Impression and recall order effects in behavior indirect tactics of image management: Basking and based impression formation. Journal of Personal- blasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- ity and Social Psychology, 37, 1758-1768. chology, 39, 406-415. Ebbesen, E. B., Kjos, G. L., & Konecni, V. J. (1976). Claeys, W., & Timmers, L. (1993). Some instantia- Spatial : Its effects on the choice of friends tions of the informational negativity effect: Posi- and enemies. Journal of Experimental Social Psy- tive-negative asymmetry in category breadth and chology, 12, 505-518. in estimated meaning similarity of trait adjectives. Eliade, M. (1982). A history of religious ideas. Vol. European Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 111- 2: From Gautama Buddha to the triumph of Chris- 129. tianity (W. Trask, Trans.). Chicago: University of Clore, G. L., & Ortony, A. (1988). The semantics of Chicago Press. affective lexicon. In V. Hamilton, G. H. Bower, & Eliade, M. (1985). A history of religious ideas. Vol. N. H. Frijda (Eds.), Cognitive perspectives on 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms. (A. emotion and motivation. NATO ASI series D: Be- Hiltebeitel & D. Apostolos-Cappadona, Trans.). havioural and social (Vol. 44, pp. 367- Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 397). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Aca- Elliot, A., & Covington, M. (2001). Approach and demic. avoidance motivation. Educational Psychology Clore, G. L., Schwarz, N., & Conway, M. (1994). Review, 17, 73-92. Affective causes and consequences of social infor- Esses, V. M, & Zanna, M. P. (1995). Mood and the mation processing. In R. Wyer & T. Srull (Eds.), expression of ethnic stereotypes. Journal of Per- Handbook of social cognition (2nd ed., pp. 323- sonality and Social Psychology, 69, 1052-1068. 417). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Exline, J. J., & Baumeister, R. F. (1999). [Forgive- Cohen, S., & Herbert, T. B. (1996). Health psychol- ness in prisoner's dilemma games]. Unpublished ogy: Psychological factors and physical disease findings, Case Western Reserve University. from the perspective of human psychoneuroimmu- Feldman, S. (1966). Motivational aspects of attitudi- nology. Annual Review of Psychology, 47, 113- nal elements and their place in cognitive interac- 142. tion. In S. Feldman (Ed.), Cognitive consistency: Coleman, L. M., Jussim, L., & Abraham, J. (1987). Motivational antecedents and behavioral conse- Students' reactions to teacher evaluations: The quences (pp. 75-108). New York: Academic unique impact of negative feedback. Journal of Press. Applied Social Psychology, 17, 1051-1070. Festinger, L., Schachter, S., & Back, K. (1950). So- Costantini, A. F., & Hoving, K. L. (1973). The ef- cial pressures in informal groups: A study of a fectiveness of reward and punishment contingen- housing community. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni- cies on response inhibition. Journal of Experimen- versity Press. tal Child Psychology, 16, 484-494. Fiedler, L. A. (1982). Love and death in the Ameri- Czapinski, J. (1985). Negativity bias in psychology: can novel. New York: Stein & Day. (Original work An analysis of Polish publications. Polish Psycho- published 1966). logical Bulletin, 16, 27-44. Finch, J. F., Okun, M. A., Barrera, M., Jr., Zautra, Czapinski, J. (1986). Informativeness of evaluations A. J., & Reich, J. W. (1989). Positive and negative in interpersonal communication: Effects of va- social ties among older adults: Measurement mod- lence, extremity of evaluations, and ego-involve- els and the prediction of psychological distress and ment of evaluator. Polish Psychological Bulle- well-being. American Journal of Community Psy- tin, 17, 155-164. chology, 17, 585-605. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 365

Finkenauer, C, & Rime", B. (1998). Socially shared Health implications. Brain Behavior Immunol- emotional experiences vs. emotional experiences ogy, 1, 7-20. kept secret: Differential characteristics and conse- Goodhart, D. E. (1986). The effects of positive and quences. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychol- negative thinking on performance in an achieve- ogy, 17, 295-318. ment situation. Journal of Personality and Social Fiore, J., Becker, J., & Coppel, D. B. (1983). Social Psychology, 51, 117-124. network interactions: A buffer or a stress. Ameri- Gottman, J. (1994). Why marriages succeed or fail. can Journal of Community Psychology, 11, 423- New York: Simon & Schuster. 439. Gottman, J. M. (1979). Marital interaction. New Fiske, S. T. (1980). Attention and weight in person York: Academic Press. perception: The impact of negative and extreme Gottman, J. M., & Krokoff, L. J. (1989). Marital behavior. Journal of Experimental Research in interaction and satisfaction: A longitudinal view. Personality, 22, 889-906. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychol- Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition. ogy, 57, 47-52. New York: McGraw-Hill. Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1986). Assess- Fleming, J., Mullen, P. E., Sibthorpe, B., & Bammer, ing the role of emotion in marriage. Behavioral G. (1999). The long-term impact of childhood sex- Assessment, 8, 31-48. ual abuse in Australian women. Child Abuse and Graziano, W. G., Brothen, T., & Berscheid, E. Neglect, 23, 145-159. (1980). Attention, attraction, and individual differ- Forgas, J. P. (1992). Mood and the perception of ences in reaction to criticism. Journal of Person- unusual people: Affective asymmetry in memory ality and Social Psychology, 38, 193-202. and social judgments. European Journal of Social Greenberg, M. A., & Stone, A. A. (1992). Writing Psychology, 22, 531-547. about disclosed versus undisclosed traumas: Im- Francis, M. E., & Pennebaker, J. W. (1992). Putting mediate and long-term effects on mood and health. stress into words: The impact of writing on phys- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, iological, absentee, and self-reported emotional 75-84. well-being measures. American Journal of Health Greenwald, A.G. (1980). The totalitarian ego: Fabri- Promotion, 6, 280-287. cation and revision of personal history. American Frankl, V. E. (1963). Man's search for meaning: An Psychologist, 35, 603-618. introduction to logotherapy. New York: Washing- Hamilton, D. L., & Huffman, L. J. (1971). Generality ton Square Press. of impression formation processes for evaluative French, D. C, Waas, G. A., Tarver-Behring, S. A. and nonevaluative judgments. Journal of Person- (1986). Nomination and rating scale sociometrics: ality and Social Psychology, 20, 200-207. Convergent validity and clinical utility. Behavioral Hamilton, D. L., & Zanna, M. P. (1972). Differential Assessment, 8, 331-340. weighting of favorable and unfavorable attributes Garcia, J., & Koelling, R. A. (1966). Relation of cue in impressions of personality. Journal of Experi- to consequence in avoidance learning. Psy- mental Research in Personality, 6, 204-212. chonomic Science, 4, 123-124. Helson, H. (1964). Adaptation-level theory: An ex- Gauggel, S., Wietasch, A., Bayer, C, & Rolko, C. perimental and systematic approach to behavior. (2000). The impact of positive and negative feed- New York: Harper. back on reaction time in brain-damaged patients. Herbert, T. B., Cohen, S., Marsland, A. L., Bachen, Neuropsychology, 14, 125-133. E. A., & Rabin, B. S. (1994). Cardiovascular re- Gilbert, A. N., Fridlund, A. J., & Sabini, J. (1987). activity and the course of immune response to an Hedonic and social determinants of facial displays acute psychological stressor. Psychosomatic Med- to odors. Chemical Senses, 12, 355-363. icine, 56, 337-344. Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C, Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: A curve: Intelligence and class structure in America. source of durability bias in affective forecasting. New York: Free Press. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-discrepancy: A theory 617-638. relating self and affect. Psychological Review, 94, Gilovich, T. (1983). Biased evaluation and persis- 319-340. tence in gambling. Journal of Social and Personal Higgins, E. T. (1996). The "self digest": Self-knowl- Psychology, 44, 1110-1126. edge serving self-regulatory functions. Journal of Gilovich, T. (1991). How we know what isn't so. Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 1062-1083. New York: Free Press. Hodges, B. H. (1974). Effect of valence on relative Glaser, R., Rice, J., Sheridan, J., Fertel, R., & Stout, weighting in impression formation. Journal of J.C. (1987). Stress-related immune suppression: Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 378-381. 366 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

Holmes, D. S. (1970). Differential change in affec- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1984). Choices, val- tive intensity and the forgetting of unpleasant per- ues, and frames. American Psychologist, 39, 341— sonal experiences. Journal of Personality and So- 350. cial Psychology, 3, 234-239. Kanouse, D. E., & Hanson, L. R. (1972). Negativity Holtzworth-Munroe, A., & Jacobson, N. S. (1985). in evaluations. In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Causal attributions of marital couples: When do Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins, & B. Weiner they search for causes? What do they conclude (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of be- when they do? Journal of Personality and Social havior (pp. 47-62). Morristown, NJ: General Psychology, 48, 1398-1412. Learning. Hoorens, V. (1995). Self-favoring biases, self-pre- Keinan, G. (1987). Decision making under stress: Scanning of alternatives under controllable and sentation, and the self-other asymmetry in social uncontrollable threats. Journal of Personality and comparison. Journal of Personality, 63, 793-817. Social Psychology, 52, 639-644. Hoorens, V. (1996). Self-favoring biases for positive Kellermann, K. (1984). The negativity effect and its and negative characteristics: Independent phenom- implications for initial interaction. Communication ena? Journal of Social and Clinical Psychol- Monographs, 51, 37-55. ogy, 15, 53-67. Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., Garner, W., Speicher, C. E., Huston, T. L., Caughlin, J. P., Houts, R. M., Smith, Penn, G. M., Holliday, J., & Glaser, R. (1984). S. E., & George, L. J. (2001). The connubial cru- Psychosocial modifiers of immunocompetence in cible: Newlywed years as predictors of marital medical students. Psychosomatic Medicine, 46, delight, distress, and divorce. Journal of Person- 7-14. ality and Social Psychology, 80, 281-293. Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., Glaser, R., Strain, E., Stout, J., Huston, T. L., & Vangelisti, A. L. (1991). Socioemo- & Tarr, K. (1986). Modulation of cellular immu- tional behavior and satisfaction in marital relation- nity in medical students. Journal of Behavioral ships: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality Medicine, 9, 5-21. and Social Psychology, 61, 721-733. Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K., Glaser, R., Williger, D., Stout, Ikegami, T. (1993). Positive-negative asymmetry of J., & Messick, G. (1985). Psychological enhance- priming effects on impression formation. Euro- ment of immunocompetence in a geriatric popula- pean Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 1-16. tion. , 4, 25-41. Ito, T. A., Cacioppo, J. T., & Lang, P. J. (1998). Klein, W. M. (1992, March). Constructing social Eliciting affecting using the International Affec- : Greater bias for negative than for positive tive Picture System: Bivariate evaluation and am- behaviors? Paper presented at the annual meeting bivalence. Personality and Social Psychology Bul- of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston. letin, 24, 855-879. Klinger, E., Barta, S. G., & Maxeiner, M. E. (1980). Ito, T. A., Larsen, J. T., Smith, N. K., & Cacioppo, Motivational correlates of thought content fre- J. T. (1998). Negative information weighs more quency and commitment. Journal of Personality heavily on the brain: The negativity bias in eval- and Social Psychology, 39, 1222-1237. uative categorizations. Journal of Personality and Kreitler, H., & Kreitler, S. (1968). Unhappy memo- Social Psychology, 75, 887-900. ries of the "happy past": Studies in cognitive dis- sonance. British Journal of Psychology, 59, 157- Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor. Westwood, CT: 166. Praeger. Krull, D. S., & Dill, J. C. (1998). Do smiles elicit Jones, E. E., & Berglas, S. C. (1978). Control of more inferences than do frowns? The effect of attributions about the self through self-handicap- emotional valence on the production of spontane- ping strategies: The appeal of alcohol and the role ous inferences. Personality and Social Psychology of underachievement. Personality and Social Psy- Bulletin, 24, 289-300. chology Bulletin, 4, 200-206. Kuiper, N. A., & Derry, P. A. (1982). Depressed and Jones, E. E., & Davis, K. E. (1965). From acts to nondepressed content self-reference in mild de- dispositions: The attribution process in person per- pression. Journal of Personality, 50, 67-79. ception. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in exper- Laible, D. J., & Thompson, R. A. (1998). Attachment imental social psychology (Vol. 2, pp. 219-266). and emotional understanding in preschool chil- New York: Academic Press. dren. Developmental Psychology, 34, 1038-1045. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect the- Larsen, R. J., Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1986). ory: An analysis of decisions under risk. Econo- Affect intensity and reactions to daily life. Journal metrica, 47, 263-291. of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 803- Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). The psychol- 814. ogy of preferences. Scientific American, 246, 160— Laumann, E. O., Gagnon, J. H., Michael, R. T., & 173. Michaels, S. (1994). The social organization of BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 367

sexuality: Sexual practices in the United States. McCarthy, B. W. (1999). Marital style and its effects Chicago: University of Chicago Press. on sexual desire and functioning. Journal of Fam- Laumann, E. O., Paik, A., & Rosen, R. C. (1999). ily Psychotherapy, 10, 1-12. Sexual dysfunction in the United States: Preva- McFarlin, D. B., & Blascovich, J. (1981). Effects of lence and predictors. Journal of the American self-esteem and performance feedback on future Medical Association, 281, 537-544. affective preferences and cognitive expectations. Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as an interpersonal mon- 521-531. itor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Per- Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (1997). When doing sonality and Social Psychology, 68, 518-530. better means feeling worse: The effects of categor- LeDoux, J. E., Romanski, L., & Xagoraris, A. (1989). ical cutoff points on counterfactual thinking and Indelibility of subcortical memories. Journal of satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social Cognitive Neuroscience, 1, 238-243. Psychology, 72, 1284-1296. Leith, K. P., & Baumeister, R. F. (1996). Why do bad Meyer, W. J., & Offenbach, S. (1962). Effectiveness moods increase self-defeating behavior? Emotion, of reward and punishment as a function of task risk taking, and self-regulation. Journal of Person- complexity. Journal of Comparative and Physio- ality and Social Psychology, 71, 1250-1267. logical Psychology, 55, 532-534. Levenson, R. W., & Gottman, J. M. (1983). Marital Miller, N. E. (1944). Experimental studies of conflict. interaction: Physiological linkage and affective ex- In J. McV. Hunt (Ed.), Personality and the behav- change. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- ior disorders (Vol. 1, pp. 431-465). New York: chology, 45, 587-597. Ronald Press. Levenson, R. W., & Gottman, J. M. (1985). Physio- Miltner, W. H. R., Braun, C. H., & Coles, M. G. H. logical and affective predictors of change in rela- (1997). Event-related brain potentials following tionship satisfaction. Journal of Personality and incorrect feedback in a time-estimation task: Evi- Social Psychology, 49, 85-94. dence for a "generic" neural system for error de- Luu, P., Collins, P., & Tucker, D. M. (2000). Mood, tection. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, personality, and self-monitoring: Negative affect 788-798. and in relation to frontal lobe mech- Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., & Zeiss, A. R. (1976). anisms of error monitoring. Journal of Experimen- Determinants of selective memory about the self. tal Psychology: General, 129, 43-60. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychol- Major, B., Zubek, J. M., Cooper, M. L., Cozzarelli, ogy, 44, 92-103. C, & Richards, C. (1997). Mixed messages: Im- plications of social conflict and social support Mullen, B., & Johnson, C. (1990). Distinctiveness- within close relationships for adjustment to a based illusory correlations and stereotyping: A stressful life event. Journal of Personality and meta-analytic integration. British Journal of Social Social Psychology, 72, 1349-1363. Psychology, 29, 11-28. Manne, S. L., Taylor, K. L., Dougherty, J., & Ke- Myers, D. G. (1992). The pursuit of happiness. New meny, N. (1997). Supportive and negative re- York: Avon Books. sponses in the partner relationship: Their associ- Myers, J. L., Reilly, R. E., & Taub, H. A. (1961). ation with psychological adjustment among in- Differential cost, gain, and relative frequency of dividuals with cancer. Journal of Behavioral reward in a sequential choice situation. Journal of Medicine, 20, 101-125. Experimental Psychology, 62, 357-360. Marshall, L. L., & Kidd, R. F. (1981): Good news or Newcomb, A. F., Bukowski, W. M., & Pattee, L. bad news first? Social Behavior and Personality, 9, (1993). Children's peer relations: A meta-analytic 223-226. review of popular, rejected, neglected, controver- Martijn, C, Spears, R., van der Pligt, J., & Jakobs, E. sial, and average sociometric status. Psychological (1992). Negativity and positivity effects in person Bulletin, 113, 99-128. perception and inference: Ability versus morality. Nezlek, J. B., & Gable, S. L. (1999). Daily events, European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 453- day-to-day psychological adjustment, and depres- 463. sive symptoms. Manuscript submitted for publica- Maslow, A. H. (1968). Toward a psychology of be- tion. ing. New York: Van Nostrand. Oehman, A., Lundqvist, D., & Esteves, F. (2001). Matlin, M. W., & Stang, D. J. (1978). The pollyanna The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage principle. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality and Matt, J., Vasquez, C, & Campbell, W. K. (1992). Social Psychology, 80, 381-396. Mood-congruent recall of affectively toned stim- Ogilvie, D. M. (1987). The undesired self: A ne- uli: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology glected variable in personality research. Journal of Review, 12, 227-255. Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 379-385. 368 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

Ohira, H., Winton, W. M., & Oyama, M. (1997). Rabbitt, P. M. A. (1966). Error correction time with- Effects of stimulus valence on recognition memory out external error signals. Nature, 212, 438. and endogenous eyeblinks: Further evidence for Reyes, G. M., Afifi, W. A., Krawchuk, A., Imperato, positive-negative asymmetry. Personality and So- N., Shelley, D., & Lee, J. (1999, June). Just (don't) cial Psychology Bulletin, 24, 986-993. talk: Comparing the impact of interaction style on Okun, M. A., Melichar, J. F., & Hill, M. D. (1990). sexual desire and social attraction. Paper pre- Negative daily events, positive and negative social sented at the conference of the Internationa] Net- ties, and psychological distress among older work on Personal Relationships, Louisville, KY. adults. Gerontologist, 30, 193-199. Riskey, D. R., & Birnbaum, M. H. (1974). Compen- Osgood, C. E., & Tzeng, O. C. S. (1990). Language, satory effects in moral judgment: Two rights don't meaning, and culture: The selected papers ofC. E. make up for a wrong. Journal of Experimental Osgood. New York: Praeger. Psychology, 103, 171-173. Pagel, M. D., Erdly, W. W., & Becker, J. (1987). Riskin, J., & Faunce, E. E. (1970). Family interaction Social networks: We get by with (and in of) scales: III. Discussion of methodology and sub- a little help from our friends. Journal of Person- stantive findings. Archives of General Psychiatry, ality and Social Psychology, 53, 793-804. 22, 527-537. Peeters, G., & Czapinski, J. (1990). Positive-nega- Robinson-Riegler, G. L., & Winton, W. M. (1996). tive asymmetry in evaluations: The distinction be- The role of conscious recollection in recognition of tween affective and informational negativity ef- affective material: Evidence for positive-negative fects. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), Eu- asymmetry. Journal of General Psychology, 123, ropean review of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 93-104. 33-60). New York: Wiley. Robinson-Whelen, S., Kim, C, MacCallum, R. C, & Pennebaker, J. W. (1993). Putting stress into words: Kiecolt-Glaser, J. K. (1997). Distinguishing opti- Health, linguistic, and therapeutic implications. mism from pessimism in older adults: Is it more Behaviour Research and Therapy, 31, 539-548. important to be optimistic or not to be pessimistic? Pennebaker, J. W., & Beall, S. K. (1986). Confront- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73, ing a traumatic event: Toward an understanding of 1345-1353. inhibition and disease. Journal of Personality and Rook, K. S. (1984). The negative side of social Social Psychology, 58, 528-537. interaction: Impact on psychological well-being. Pennebaker, J. W., Kiecolt-Glaser, J., & Glaser, R. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, (1988). Disclosure of traumas and immune func- 1097-1108. tion: Health implications for psychotherapy. Jour- Rothbart, M, & Park, B. (1986). On the confirmabil- nal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 56, ity and disconfirmability of trait concepts. Journal 239-245. of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 131— Penney, R. K. (1968). Effect of reward and punish- 142. ment on children's orientation and discrimination Rowe, D. C, Jacobson, K. C, & Van den Oord, learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1, E. J. C. G. (1999). Genetic and environmental 140-142. influences on vocabulary IQ: Parental education Penney, R. K., & Lupton, A. A. (1961). Children's level as a moderator. Child Development, 70, discrimination learning as a function of reward and 1151-1162. punishment. Journal of Comparative and Physio- Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (in press). Negativity logical Psychology, 54, 449-451. bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Per- Pittman, J. F., & Lloyd, S. A. (1988). Quality of sonality and Social Psychology Review. family life, social support, and stress. Journal of Ruehlman, L. S., & Wolchik, S. A. (1988). Personal Marriage and the Family, 50, 53-67. goals and interpersonal support and hindrance as Posner, M. I. (1994). Attention: The mechanisms of factors in psychological distress and well-being. consciousness. Procedures of the National Acad- Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55, emy of Sciences, USA, 91, 7398-7403. 293-301. Pratto, F., & John, O. P. (1991). Automatic vigilance: Rusbult, C. E., Johnson, D. J., & Morrow, G. D. The attention-grabbing power of negative social (1986). Impact of couple patterns of problem solv- information. Journal of Personality and Social ing on distress and nondistress in dating relation- Psychology, 61, 380-391. ships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychol- Quirk, G. J., Repa, J. C, & LeDoux, J. E. (1995). ogy, 50, 744-753. Fear conditioning enhances short-latency auditory Rusbult, C. E., & Zembrodt, J. M. (1983). Responses responses of lateral amygdala neurons: Parallel to dissatisfaction in romantic involvements: A recordings in the freely behaving rat. Neuron, 15, multidimensional scaling analysis. Journal of Ex- 1029-1039. perimental Social Psychology, 19, 274-293. BAD IS STRONGER THAN GOOD 369

Russell, J. A., Fernandez-Dols, J. M, Manstead, nal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 831— A. S. R., & Wellenkamp, J. (Eds.). (1995). Every- 843. day conceptions of emotion: An introduction to the Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1987). Social psychology, anthropology, and linguistics of emo- judgment and social memory: The role of cue tion. Behavioral and social sciences (Vol. 81, pp. diagnosticity in negativity, positivity, and extrem- 244-297). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer ity biases. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- Academic. chology, 52, 689-699. Rynd, N. (1988). Incidence of psychometric symp- Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1989). Nega- toms in rape victims. Journal of Sex Research, 24, tivity and extremity biases in impression forma- 155-161. tion: A review of explanation. Psychological Re- Sanghera, M. K., Rolls, E. T., & Roper-Hall, A. view, 105, 131-142. (1979). Visual response of neurons in the dorso- Skowronski, J. J., & Carlston, D. E. (1992). Caught lateral amygdala of the alert monkey. Experimen- in the act: When impressions based on highly tal Neurology, 63, 610-626. diagnostic behaviours are resistant to contradic- Scarr, S. (1992). Developmental theories for the tion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 1990's: Development and individual differences. 435-452. Child Development, 63, 1-19. Spence, J. T. (1966). Verbal discrimination perfor- Scheier, M. F., & Carver, C. S. (1985). Optimism, mance as a function of instruction and verbal- coping, and health: Assessment and implications reinforcement combination in normal and retarded of generalized expectancy on health. Health Psy- children. Child Development, 37, 269-281. chology, 4, 219-247. Spence, J. T., & Segner, L. L. (1967). Verbal vs. Schulz, R., Bookwala, J., Knapp, J. E., Scheier, M, nonverbal reinforcement combinations in the dis- & Williamson, G. M. (1996). Pessimism, age, and crimination learning of middle and lower class children. Child Development, 38, 29-38. cancer mortality. Psychology and Aging, 11, 304- 309. Stafford, L., & Canary, D. J. (1991). Maintenance strategies and romantic relationship type, gender, Schuster, T. L., Kessler, R. C, & Aseltine, R. H., Jr. and relational characteristics. Journal of Social (1990). Supportive interactions, negative interac- and Personal Relationships, 8, 217-242. tions, and depressed mood. American Journal of Sternbach, R. A. (1968). Pain: A psychophysiologi- Community Psychology, 18, 423-438. cal analysis. New York: Academic Press. Schwarz, N. (1990). Feelings as information: Infor- Styron, T., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1997). Childhood mational and motivational functions of affective attachment and abuse: Long-term effects on adult states. In E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), attachment, depression and conflict resolution. The handbook of motivation and cognition: Foun- Child Abuse and Neglect, 21, 1015-1023. dations of social behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 527-561). Taylor, S. E. (1983). Adjustment to threatening New York: Guilford Press. events: A theory of cognitive adaptation. American Sedikides, C. (1993). Assessment, enhancement, and Psychologist, 38, 1161-1173. verification determinants of the self-evaluation Taylor, S. E. (1991). Asymmetrical effects of posi- process. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- tive and negative events: The mobilization-mini- chology, 65, 317-338. mization hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 110, Seligman, M. (1999, April). Positive social science 67-85. [president's column]. APA Monitor, p. 2. Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and Shah, J., Higgins, E. T., Friedman, R., & Kruglanski, well-being: A social psychological perspective on A. (1999, August). The regulatory focus and goal mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193— organization: Implications for self-regulation. Pa- 210. per presented at the annual of the Thomas, D.L., & Diener, E. (1990). Memory accu- American Psychological Association, Boston. racy in the recall of emotions. Journal of Person- Sheldon, K. M, Ryan, R., & Reis, H. T. (1996). What ality and Social Psychology, 59, 291-297. makes for a good day? Competence and Thompson, L. A., Tiu, R. D., & Detterman, D. K. in the day and in the person. Personality and (1999, July). Differences in the heritability of gen- Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1270-1279. eral intelligence across levels of father's occupa- Silver, R. L., Boon, C, & Stones, M. H. (1983). tion. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Searching for meaning in misfortune: Making Behavior Genetics Association, Vancouver, Brit- sense of incest. Journal of Social Issues, 39, 81- ish Columbia, Canada. 102. Tice, D. M. (1991). Esteem protection or enhance- Skowronski, J. J., Betz, A. L., Thompson, C. P., & ment? Self-handicapping motives and attributions Shannon, L. (1991). Social memory in everyday differ by trait self-esteem. Journal of Personality life: Recall of self-events and other-events. Jour- and Social Psychology, 60, 711-725. 370 BAUMEISTER, BRATSLAVSKY, FINKENAUER, AND VOHS

Tindall, R. C, & Ratliff, R. G. (1974). Interaction of Webster, E. C. (1964). Decision making in the em- reinforcement conditions and developmental level ployment interview. Montreal, Quebec, Canada: in a two-choice discrimination task with children. McGill University Industrial Relations Centre. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 18, Weinberg, G. M. (1975). An introduction to general 183-189. systems thinking. New York: Wiley. Ting-Toomey, S. (1983). An analysis of verbal com- Weiner, B. (1985). "Spontaneous" causal thinking. munication patterns in high and low marital adjust- Psychological Bulletin, 97, 74-84. ment groups. Human Communication Research, 9, Weinstein, N.D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about 306-319. future life events. Journal of Personality and So- Tuohy, A. P., & Stradling, S. G. (1987). Maximum cial Psychology, 39, 806-820. salience vs. golden section proportions in judge- Weiss, E. L., Longhurst, J. G., & Mazure, C. M. mental asymmetry. British Journal of Psychol- (1999). Childhood sexual abuse as a risk factor for ogy, 78, 457-464. depression in women: Psychosocial and neurobio- Van Goozen, S., & Frijda, N. H. (1993). Emotion logical correlates. American Journal of Psychiatry, words used in six European countries. European 156, 816-828. Journal of Social Psychology, 23, 89-95. Wells, J. D., Hobfoll, S. E., & Lavin, J. (1999). When Vinokur, A. D., & van Ryn, M. (1993). Social sup- it rains, it pours: The greater impact of resource port and undermining in close relationships: Their loss compared to gain on psychological distress. independent effects on the mental health of unem- Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, ployed persons. Journal of Personality and Social 1172-1182. Psychology, 65, 350-359. Wills, T. A., Weiss, R. L., & Patterson, G. R. (1974). Vonk, R. (1993). The negativity effect in trait ratings and in open-ended descriptions of persons. Per- A behavioral analysis of the determinants of mar- sonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 269- ital satisfaction. Journal of Consulting and Clini- 278. cal Psychology, 6, 802-811. Vonk, R. (1996). Negativity and potency effects in Wright, B. A. (1991). Labeling: The need for greater impression formation. European Journal of Social person-environment individuation. In C. R. Snyder Psychology, 26. 851-865. & D. R. Forsyth (Eds.), Handbook of social and Vonk, R. (1999). Differential evaluations of likable clinical psychology: The health perspective (pp. and dislikeable behaviors enacted towards superi- 469-487). Elmsford, NY: Pergamon. ors and subordinates. European Journal of Social Wyer, R. S., & Hinkle, R. L. (1971). Informational Psychology, 29, 139-146. factors underlying inferences about hypothetical Vonk, R., & Knippenberg, A. V. (1994). The sover- persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- eignty of negative inferences: of ulterior chology, 34, 481-495. motives does not reduce the negativity effect. So- Yzerbyt, V. Y., & Leyens, J. P. (1991). Requesting cial Cognition, 12, 169-186. information to form an impression: The influence Walker, W. R., Vogl, R. J., & Thompson, C. P. of valence and confirmatory status. Journal of Ex- (1997). Autobiographical memory: Unpleasant- perimental Social Psychology, 27, 337-356. ness fades faster than pleasantness over time. Ap- plied , 11, 399-413. Watson, D., & Tellegen, A. (1985). Toward a con- Received March 15, 2001 sensual structure of mood. Psychological Bulle- Revision received April 16, 2001 tin, 98, 219-235. Accepted April 16, 2001 •