The content shared on ‘Wholesome Memes’ lives up to its name, and it generally feels like visual chicken soup for the soul: warm, nurturing, and healing. Not only is it a welcome break from a lot of the pessimism and negativity that you’ll often find on social media and in the news, but it’s also a reminder that no matter how bad things seem, there’s usually a silver lining if you look for it.
Things in real life are rarely black and white, they’re often a nuanced mix of both. On the one hand, you don’t want to consume just negative content because it’ll affect your mental and emotional health. On the other hand, you shouldn’t live in a bubble of naivety and toxic positivity either. Ideally, you’ll have a balanced digital ‘diet’ that helps you get as close to the truth about how the world really works as you can.
According to one recent study, negative and emotional words have a direct effect on online news consumption.
Research showed that even though positive words were more prevalent than negative ones in the dataset used, negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates, while positive ones decreased them.
The study from 2023, which looked at 105k headlines encompassing over 370 million impressions of news stories from ‘Upworthy,’ found that “For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. This is significant in determining why users engage with online media because it is “important for society in informing and shaping opinions.”
Broadly speaking, human beings are hardwired to focus more on negativity than positivity because the former is more useful for survival. When you’re more attuned to the potential dangers that surround you, you’re more likely to survive and end up passing on your genes.
To put it simply, your brain’s focus on negativity is one of the ways in which it tries to protect you.
“The negativity bias is our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily but also to dwell on these events. Also known as positive-negative asymmetry, this negativity bias means that we feel the sting of a rebuke more powerfully than we feel the joy of praise,” Verywell Mind explains.
People are more likely to notice negative things in almost any interaction. This negativity is also what we remember more vividly later. For example, the average human being will recall insults more than praise and traumatic experiences more than positive ones.
They also react more strongly to negative stimuli and respond more strongly to negative events.
