Positive, negative thinkers’ brains revealed

The ability to stay positive when times get tough – and, conversely, of being negative – may be hardwired in the brain, finds new research led by a Michigan State University psychologist.

The study, which appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is the first to provide biological evidence validating the idea that there are, in fact, positive and negative people in the world.

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to find a brain marker that really distinguishes negative thinkers from positive thinkers,” said Jason Moser, lead investigator and assistant professor of psychology.

For the study, 71 female participants were shown graphic images and asked to put a positive spin on them while their brain activity was recorded. Participants were shown a masked man holding a knife to a woman’s throat, for example, and told one potential outcome was the woman breaking free and escaping.

The participants were surveyed beforehand to establish who tended to think positively and who thought negatively or worried. Sure enough, the brain reading of the positive thinkers was much less active than that of the worriers during the experiment.

“The worriers actually showed a paradoxical backfiring effect in their brains when asked to decrease their negative emotions,” Moser said. “This suggests they have a really hard time putting a positive spin on difficult situations and actually make their negative emotions worse even when they are asked to think positively.”

The study focused on women because they are twice as likely as men to suffer from anxiety related problems and previously reported sex differences in brain structure and function could have obscured the results.

Moser said the findings have implications in the way negative thinkers approach difficult situations.

“You can’t just tell your friend to think positively or to not worry – that’s probably not going to help them,” he said. “So you need to take another tack and perhaps ask them to think about the problem in a different way, to use different strategies.”

Negative thinkers could also practice thinking positively, although Moser suspects it would take a lot of time and effort to even start to make a difference.

Negative Thoughts Can Be Contagious

The way the people around us respond to stressful events — whether those people react negatively or positively — may be contagious when we are in the midst of a major life transition, a new study says.

What’s more, the increased risk of depression that comes with negative thinking also seems to rub off during these times, the study found.

For the study, researchers looked at 103 pairs of college-freshmen roommates’ “cognitive vulnerability,” which is the tendency to think that negative events are a reflection of a person’s own deficiency or that they will lead to more negative events. Those with high cognitive vulnerability are at an increased risk of depression, studies have found.

"We found that participants’ level of cognitive vulnerability was significantly influenced by their roommates’ level of cognitive vulnerability, and vice versa," the researchers wrote. All roommates in the study were selected randomly; students did not choose their roommates. Only three months of living together was needed for this contagiousness to be seen.

The researchers also found that those who experienced an increase in cognitive vulnerability during the first three months of college had nearly twice the level of depressive symptoms at six months, compared with those who did not experience an increase in cognitive vulnerability, according to the study. The effect was particularly strong when participants were under high-stress conditions.

Prior to this study, it was thought that cognitive vulnerability didn’t change much once a person passed early adolescence. However, the new findings suggest that during big transitions in life — when a person is continually exposed to a new social situation — cognitive vulnerability can be altered, the researchers said.

They noted that genetic, biological and environmental factors all likely play a role in a person’s level of cognitive vulnerability.

Further research is needed to determine whether cognitive vulnerability may change over time, the researchers said, noting that college freshmen are in a unique social environment. 

"Our findings are consistent with a growing number of studies that have found that many psychological and biological factors previously thought to be set in stone by adulthood continue to be malleable,” the researchers said.

The study was published online April 16 in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.