Praise
Is Fleeting, but Brickbats We Recall
This
article talks about how it is natural for humans to recall bad
memories more than good memories. No matter how positive your outlook
on life is or how many pleasant experiences you have in life, it is
just natural to remember the bad ones better. After reading this
article, I tried recalling specific events in my life, and I did have
and easier time remember the negative ones, especially recalling
specific emotions I had during these negative events. They say that
the reason for this is because “The brain handles positive and
negative information in different hemispheres.”
Even
a good experience like winning money will have less impact than
receiving a negative comment from a friend. They say the reason for
this is that bad memories wear off more slowly than good ones. Also
negative emotions involve thinking more so the information is
processed differently than good experiences. The article said that we
use stronger words to describe bad events than we use to describe
happy ones. It's interesting that even just our word choice helps us
remember events differently.
Remembering
bad moments may be evolutionary as well as psychological. People who
were “more attuned to bad things would have been more likely to
survive threats and, consequently, would have increased the
probability of passing along their genes.” This is because to
survive, it is more important to pay attention to possible bad
outcomes more than it is to pay attention to possible good ones.
The
article had some very interesting points such as how with this
knowledge we could better the work place by how bosses treat their
employees and how we can produce a better more efficient and
productive work environment. There is one point in the article I
don’t quite agree on though. It talked about how that we may praise
children too much when they're young for too many meaningless things,
saying how they can't build up a resilience to negative feedback. I
feel as if giving a child positive feed back can also cause them to
continue to do well in order to receive more positive feed back,
whereas negative feedback may just upset a small child, making them
feel bad about themselves.
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