Are Some People Hardwired to Be Positive?

Sharon Moore April 04, 2014

For many years, scientists believed in the negativity bias theory, which suggests that our brain is hardwired to favour negative thoughts over positive ones. But for the first time, researchers found that not all people are born negative thinkers. Some, according to them, are actually born to be positive thinkers.

The new study, which was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is the first to provide biological evidence validating the idea that there are, in fact, positive and negative people in the world.

It involved 71 female participants who were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. Participants were shown a masked man holding a knife to a woman’s throat, for example, and told one potential outcome was the woman breaking free and escaping. The participants were surveyed beforehand to establish who tended to think positively and who thought negatively or worried. Sure enough, the brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that of the worriers during the experiment.

The ‘pessimistic’ participants showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions. According to Jason Moser, lead investigator and assistant professor of psychology at Michigan State University, findings suggest that these people “have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.” Meanwhile, the brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that of the worriers during the experiment.

Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.

"You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry – that’s probably not going to help them," he said. "So you need to take another tack and perhaps ask them to think about the problem in a different way, to use different strategies."

Negative thinkers could also practice thinking positively, although Moser suspects it would take a lot of time and effort to even start to make a difference.

Source of this article:

Positive, negative thinkers’ brains revealed