← all facts
emotion
Your brain gives more weight to bad news.
While Hansen and Hansen (1988) identified an 'anger superiority effect,' subsequent research indicates this finding is likely an artifact of low-level visual features in the stimuli rather than an innate psychological bias toward negative information.
The faster detection of angry faces in studies is attributed to physical visual properties, such as the sharp lines of the brows and teeth, rather than the emotional significance of the threat.
You have to exert active effort to notice what is going well.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Hansen and Hansen (1988)
- What the check found
- The study exists, but its interpretation as proof of an evolutionarily adaptive 'threat detection' bias is highly controversial and often attributed to low-level visual processing differences.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.