Positivity effect

In psychology and cognitive science, the positivity effect is a term given to three different phenomena. It is the ability to constructively analyze a situation where the desired results are not achieved; but still obtain positive feedback which assists our future progression. When considering people we like (including ourselves), we tend to make situational attributions about their negative behaviors and dis-positional attributions about their positive behaviors. We probably do the reverse for people we do not like. This may well be because of the dissonance between liking a person and seeing them behave negatively. example: If my friend hits someone, I will tell him that the other guy deserved it or that he had to defend himself.

In attribution

Main article: Selective perception

The positivity effect pertains to the tendency of people, when evaluating the causes of the behaviors of a person they like or prefer, to attribute the person's inherent disposition as the cause of their positive behaviors and the situations surrounding them as the cause of their negative behaviors. The positivity effect is the inverse of the negativity effect, which is found when people evaluate the causes of the behaviors of a person they dislike. Both effects are attributional biases.

In perception

Studies have found that older adults are more likely than younger adults to pay attention to positive than negative stimuli (as assessed by the dot-probe paradigm and eye-tracking methods). However, the effect also differs across cultures. For example, Hong Kong Chinese looked away from happy stimuli and more towards fearful stimuli, and the difference in attention pattern was related to differences in self-construal. On online social networks like Twitter, users prefer to share positive news, and are emotionally affected by positive news more than twice than by negative news.

In recall

See also: Rosy retrospection

The term positivity effect also refers to age differences in emotional attention and memory. As people get older, they experience fewer negative emotions and they tend to look to the past in a positive light. In addition, compared with younger adults' memories, older adults' memories are more likely to consist of positive than negative information and more likely to be distorted in a positive direction. This version of the positivity effect was coined by Laura L. Carstensen's research team. There is a debate about the cross-cultural generalizability of the aging-related positivity effect, with some evidence for different types of emotional processing among Americans as compared to Japanese.

Hypothesized causes

One theory of the positivity effect in older adults' memories is that it is produced by cognitive control mechanisms that improve and decrease negative information due to older adults' greater focus on emotional regulation. Research shows an age-related reversal in the valence of information processed within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). In younger adults, more MPFC activity was found in the presence of negative stimuli compared to positive stimuli whereas in older adults this was reversed.

However, the positivity effect may be different for stimuli processed automatically (pictures) and stimuli processed in a more controlled manner (words). Compared to words, pictures tend to be processed more rapidly and they engage emotion processing centres earlier. Automatic stimuli are processed in the amygdala and dorsal MPFC, whereas controlled stimuli are processed in the temporal pole and ventral MPFC. Compared to younger adults, older adults showed less amygdala activation and more MPFC activation for negative than positive pictures. Increased motivation to regulate emotion leads older adults to actively engage the mPFC differently from younger adults, which in turn yields diverging amygdala activation patterns. The opposite pattern was observed for words. Although older adults showed a positivity effect in memory for words, they did not display one for pictures. Thus, the positivity effect may arise from ageing differences in MPFC use during encoding.

In popular culture

Paul McCartney hints at the positivity effect in his song You Tell Me, in which he speaks of how, in his old age, distant memories seem predominantly positive, for instance remembering summers in which it "never rained".

History

The positivity effect was first identified when investigating socioemotional selectivity theory which is a life span theory of motivation.

See also

• List of biases in judgment and decision making
• List of memory biases

External links

• Positivity effect and cognitive control in aging
• List of papers related to aging and positivity effect