Early Negativity Bias Occurring Prior to Experiencing of Emotion

The present study analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) in different valence conditions to investigate whether negativity bias can occur prior to the experiencing of negative emotion. There were two tasks: One was challenging and participants were asked to react as quickly as possible; the other was easy and participants were asked to react after the stimuli disappeared. ERPs were compared to determine if negativity bias had occurred. Anterior hemispheric asymmetries tests (AHAT) were conducted to test emotion-evoking effects. The ERP results showed that negativity bias occurred in both tasks. However, AHAT showed that emotion was not effectively evoked in the challenging task. These results suggested that negativity bias could occur even without effective experiencing of emotion. This prompted a new viewpoint regarding the properties of negativity bias: Early negativity bias was caused by the features of negative stimuli but not by negative emotions.