Being Bad Isn’t Always Good: Affective Context Moderates the Attention Bias Toward Negative Information N. Kyle Smith Ohio Wesleyan University Jeff T. Larsen Texas Tech University Tanya L. Chartrand Duke University John T. Cacioppo University of Chicago Heather A. Katafiasz and Kathleen E. Moran Ohio Wesleyan University Research has demonstrated that people automatically devote more attention to negative information than to positive information. The authors conducted 3 experiments to test whether this bias is attenuated by a person’s affective context. Specifically, the authors primed participants with positive and negative information using traditional (e.g., subliminal semantic priming) and nontraditional (e.g., social interac- tions) means and measured the amount of attention they allocated to positive and negative information. With both event-related brain potentials (Experiment 1) and the Stroop task (Experiments 2 and 3), results suggest that the attention bias to negative information is attenuated or eliminated when positive constructs are made accessible. The implications of this result for other biases to negative information and for the self-reinforcing nature of emotional disorders are discussed. Keywords: attention bias, event-related brain potentials, positive priming Researchers have documented many information processing bi- ases toward negative information. For example, people give more weight to negative traits than positive traits in impression forma- tion tasks (Anderson, 1965; Peeters & Czapinski, 1990), they dislike losses more than they like equally large gains (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), and they make more causal attributions for negative events than for positive events (Peeters & Czapinski, 1990). This differential emphasis on negative stimuli manifests itself not only in self-report investigations but in those measuring behavior (Spence & Segner, 1967) as well as brain activity in response to positive and negative stimuli (Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998). In reviewing the literature on the relationship between the valence of a stimulus and the magnitude of the responses generated, Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, and Vohs (2001) stated, “We have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern . . . this difference may be one of the most basic and far-reaching psychological principles” (p. 362). All of the just-mentioned research demonstrates that there is an extremity bias in information processing. Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson (1997) have suggested that this is a basic operating parameter of the evaluative system. This bias arises, they stated, because for each unit of input to the positive and negative evalu- ative systems, the negative evaluation system responds with a larger output. Therefore, regardless of whether you are learning information about a new person, receiving feedback on an aca- demic pursuit, or deciding whether to bet on a sporting event, negative information will tend to play a larger role in your decision than one might normatively expect. In addition to these evaluative and elaborative biases, negative stimuli have also been shown to elicit more attention than positive stimuli. That is, apart from the extremity bias, there is also an attention bias. Early work in this domain relied on measures such as the amount of time voluntarily allocated to processing positive and negative information (e.g., Fiske, 1980; Graziano, Brothen, & Berscheid, 1980). For example, Graziano et al. (1980) found that, when participants were given the option to hear either positive or negative feedback about themselves, they chose to listen to the negative feedback for a significantly longer amount of time. As interest in automatic processes has increased and methodol- ogies to study automatic processes have developed, research sur- rounding the attention bias has shifted to assessing the extent to which negative stimuli draw attention automatically. For example, Hansen and Hansen (1988; see also O ¨ hman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) gave participants the task of locating an evaluatively dis- crepant face in an array of faces. Consistent with the attention bias, participants were faster at picking out angry faces embedded N. Kyle Smith, Heather A. Katafiasz, and Kathleen E. Moran, Department of Psychology, Ohio Wesleyan University; Jeff T. Larsen, Department of Psychology, Texas Tech University; Tanya L. Chartrand, Department of Psychology, Duke University; John T. Cacioppo, Department of Psychol- ogy, University of Chicago. We thank Todd Amdor, Laura Browne, and Phing Dong for their help during data collection. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to N. Kyle Smith, Department of Psychology, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH 43015. E-mail: nksmith@owu.edu Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 2006, Vol. 90, No. 2, 210 –220 0022-3514/06/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.90.2.210 210