Why Does the Bad Outweigh the Good?

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney dismantle psychology's most quoted numbers: the 5:1 marriage ratio, the 2.9013 flourishing threshold. Both collapsed under replication. What survives is the asymmetry itself, measured in brainwaves within the first second of evaluation. Negative images trigger larger late-wave responses than positive ones of equal intensity. Yet the fading affect bias reverses the ledger over months: negative emotion decays faster than positive. The brain isn't simply Velcro for bad; it runs two clocks.

You'll learn:

- Why the Losada ratio was retracted in 2013

- How a 90% divorce-prediction rate dropped to 29%

- When time flips the negativity advantage