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We might not have to make separate publications focused solely on the positive if the media wasn't suffering from such a bad case of negativity bias. And it's not just us saying so.
A few years ago, a team of researchers set out to analyze emotion in 23 million headlines published between 2000 and 2019 in 47 popular American outlets.
They used Transformer language models fine-tuned for detection of sentiment (positive, negative) and Paul Ekman's six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) plus neutral to automatically label the headlines. The results were grim.
A pattern of increasing negative sentiment in headlines over time was significant. Between 2000 and 2019, the average sentiment score of headlines dropped by about 314%.
The shift toward negativity became steeper after 2010, and another test showed that this change in 2010 marked a real break in the overall pattern, not just normal variation.
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Looking at headlines by political leaning, both left-leaning and right-leaning outlets have become more negative since 2000.
However, right-leaning outlets have consistently used more negative headlines than left-leaning outlets throughout the entire period.
The same pattern appears when we examine emotions in headlines. Since 2008, headlines expressing anger have increased substantially across left-, right-, and centrist outlets, but right-leaning outlets consistently show a higher proportion of anger-focused headlines than left-leaning ones.
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Researchers suggest that one possible factor for why headlines became noticeably more negative and emotionally charged around 2010 is the introduction of Facebook's "like" and Twitter's "retweet" functions (both appeared in 2009), which allowed the platforms to maximize engagement through algorithmically determined personalized feeds and gave outlets clear feedback on which types of headlines got more clicks.
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Diane Dreher, Ph.D., is a positive psychology coach, associate director of the Applied Spirituality Institute at Santa Clara University, and author of Pathways to Inner Peace.
She researches hope and flourishing, and says that we need agency (motivation) to keep moving forward, and some of the ways to build it are to:
- Use positive self-talk;
- Post a motivational quote by your desk or on your bathroom mirror;
- Share your goals with friends and keep encouraging each other;
- Visualize yourself reaching your goals.
Even if these things sound superficial, what do you have to lose? They don't cost anything. And if you need more feel-good vibes, fire up our publication 50 Unexpectedly Wholesome Situations To Brighten Your Day.