Pollyanna principle
The Pollyanna principle is the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones. Research indicates that at the subconscious level, the mind tends to focus on the optimistic; while at the conscious level, it tends to focus on the negative. This subconscious bias is similar to the Barnum effect.
Development
The name derives from the 1913 novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter describing a girl who plays the "glad game"—trying to find something to be glad about in every situation. The novel has been adapted to film several times, most famously in 1920 and 1960. An early use of the name "Pollyanna" in psychological literature was in 1969 by Boucher and Osgood who described a Pollyanna hypothesis as a universal human tendency to use positive words more frequently and diversely than negative words in communicating. Empirical evidence for this tendency has been provided by computational analyses of large corpora of text.Psychological research and findings
The Pollyanna principle was described by Margaret Matlin and David Stang in 1978 using the archetype of Pollyanna more specifically as a psychological principle which portrays the positive bias people have when thinking of the past. According to the Pollyanna principle, the brain processes information that is pleasing and agreeable in a more precise and exact manner as compared to unpleasant information. People actually tend to remember past experiences as more rosy than they actually occurred. The researchers found that people expose themselves to positive stimuli and avoid negative stimuli, they take longer to recognize what is unpleasant or threatening than what is pleasant and safe, and they report that they encounter positive stimuli more frequently than they actually do. Matlin and Stang also determined that selective recall was a more likely occurrence when recall was delayed: the longer the delay, the more selective recall that occurred.The Pollyanna principle has been observed on online social networks as well. For example, a series of studies by Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California, found that Twitter users preferentially share more, and are emotionally affected more frequently by, positive information.
However, the only exception to the Pollyanna principle tends to be individuals suffering from depression or anxiety, who are more likely to either have more depressive realism or a negative bias.
Positivity effect
The positivity effect is the ability to constructively analyze a situation where the desired results are not achieved, but still obtain positive feedback that assists one's future progression.Empirical research findings suggest that the positivity effect can be influenced by internal positive speech, where engaging in constructive self-dialogue can significantly improve one's ability to perceive and react to challenging situations more optimistically.
The findings of a study show that the optimism bias in future-oriented thinking fulfils a self-improvement purpose while also suggesting this bias probably reflects a common underpinning motivational process across various future-thinking domains, either episodic or semantic.