The Upside of Negative Thinking
Our emotions—how we feel in response to some sort of stimulus—and our general moods are interesting. They’re certainly a big part of our experiences amid adversity. And yet they’re strange. They can vary throughout the course of one’s day, but some overarching aspects of them (e.g., positive and negative affect) seem to have some stability within people. In that way, they’re a component of our emotional lives that are intertwined with or operate a bit like our personality characteristics.
And one additional curious thing about our emotions, or at least about that nebulous thing we call happiness, is that it seems like we can’t really ever be too happy. At least that’s the argument that
makes in this piece. He presents a fair amount of evidence for the fact that our happiness levels seem to be relatively stable regardless of what’s going on around us—from wars to economic depressions to periods of major social change and more.Furthermore, Mastroianni speculates that our emotions seem to work something like a thermostat, and that for various reasons, our brains turn up the AC or turn up the furnace, so to speak, to maintain a baseline level of happiness. I’ve been thinking about these ideas since reading his article and hearing him talk about it with
on his podcast, EconTalk.It brought to mind a few ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind for many years related to research on the benefits of negative thinking. Mastroianni doesn’t address these directly in his article, but they seem worth discussing—especially given the priority that’s often given to positivity and its relatives. While there are benefits to positivity and optimism and certainly hope, our beautiful minds also seem to benefit from some negativity. Here are a few of the ways that seems to happen, drawing upon a research summary published a while back in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
A Realistic View
It appears that a negative mood can help us make sense of what’s going on in a way that’s more accurate than when we’re liquored up on positivity. Research suggests that people in a negative state of mind tend to have a more focused memory of events (for example, eye-witness accounts) than those in a positive state of mind.
Why might this happen?
One idea is that a negative mood may keep us from getting too creative with our wild imaginations. Memory is a weird phenomenon; we’re easily distracted by misleading information, and our memories are simply often not as accurate as we think they are. When we’re in a positive state of mind, however, we seem to be a bit more susceptible to those creative thoughts and distractions—flashes in our brains that otherwise can otherwise be rather useful but that can also lead us astray.
Additionally, a negative mood seems to help us make better judgments, or at least ones that are somewhat less influenced by common biases. Those biases include the halo effect, in which we allow one positive characteristic to overshadow everything else, and the primacy effect, in which we pay more attention to information presented early on and ignore subsequent details. The same seems to be the case with stereotypes—there’s evidence to suggest that negative moods coincide with a lessened tendency to make broad judgments about people based upon their group membership. Again, the hypothesis behind why this appears to happen is that negativity may shield us somewhat from nonessential information.
I should note, however, that continual negative emotions or moods aren’t healthy. There’s a lot of evidence to that effect. Especially if they continue to spiral downward and have a persistently negative effect on one’s ability to function, negative emotions or moods may be a signal to get professional help for a mental health condition.
That being said, let’s move on to some additional benefits of functional negativity.
Healthy Skepticism
Most of us have been in a room with a bunch of people who were all excited about an idea. One person presents or suggests something, another person chimes to say how it’s the best idea ever, and others nod vigorously in agreement. Quickly, the idea turns into the absolute solution to everything including world hunger, and the positivity is so thick in the air that there’s no room for even the thought of a downside.
Unfortunately, such thinking can lead groups astray. I have no direct evidence, but my hunch is that there was likely quite a bit of unchallenged positivity that drove ideas like the Pet Rock and New Coke.
Negative thinking can help us by providing some healthy skepticism and guard us against gullibility. It can temper our tendencies to go along with a crowd that’s riding a wave of positivity, and it can allow us to see the situation from a different—and potentially more realistic—angle.
The Pursuit of Happiness?
Almost 250 years ago, Thomas Jefferson (with input from a handful of others) wrote the Declaration of Independence. And it was perhaps from that document that the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” became permanently enshrined in the American ethos. The second sentence of the declaration states:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
There’s plenty that’s interesting, useful, and admirable about the people who founded the United States of America and the ideas and documents they generated. But the “pursuit of happiness” is one that isn’t perfectly aligned with what seems to aid us in the long-term. In contrast to happiness, the pursuit of meaning and purpose is much more practical and less fleeting.
Happiness may come as an outcome of seeking meaning and purpose, and that’s great. I’m all for being happy, and the experiences of joy and wonder and beauty and goodness are absolutely central aspects of the best parts of life. Yet it seems wise to keep in mind that our emotions may behave a bit like a thermostat for a reason, remembering that even negativity can be useful.
References and for further reading
Forgas, Joseph P. "Don’t worry, be sad! On the cognitive, motivational, and interpersonal benefits of negative mood." Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2013): 225-232. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721412474458