How Holding Onto Negativity Threatens Psychological Well-Being

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Do you tend to hold on to negative emotions when something (or someone) annoying gets under your skin? As clichés go: Are you prone to "sweat the small stuff" and "cry over spilled milk"? Or do "Grrr!" moments and the minor aggravations you experience while going about day-to-day life tend to dissipate before something negative puts you in a foul mood?

New research suggests that people in with the happy-go-lucky ability to let negative emotions roll off their back might be creating an upward spiral of better long-term psychological well-being (PWB) by breaking the cycle of "amygdala persistence" that appears to be correlated with dwelling on negativity.

According to the researchers, how a person's brain (especially the left amygdala region) evaluates fleeting negative stimuli—either by holding on to the negativity or letting it go—may have a lasting impact on PWB. This peer-reviewed study (Puccetti et al., 2021) was published on March 22 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

First author Nikki Puccetti and senior author Aaron Heller of the University of Miami conducted this research with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Healthy Minds, Cornell University, Penn State, and the University of Reading. In addition to being an assistant professor of psychology at UMiami, Heller is a clinical psychologist, affective , and the Manatee Lab's principal investigator.

"The majority of human neuroscience research looks at how intensely the brain reacts to negative stimuli, not how long the brain holds on to a stimulus," Heller said in a news release. "We looked at the spillover—how the emotional coloring of an event spills over to other things that happen."

The first step of this interdisciplinary study was to analyze questionnaire-based data collected from 52 of the thousands of people involved in the "Midlife in the United States" (MIDUS) longitudinal study that began in the mid-1990s.

Secondly, during a nightly phone call for eight consecutive days, the researchers asked each of these 52 study participants to report specific events (e.., traffic jam, spilled coffee, computer problems) they experienced that day along with the intensity of their overall positive or negative emotions throughout the day.

Thirdly, after about a week of these one-on-one nightly calls, each study subject underwent an fMRI brain scan "that measured and mapped their brain activity as they viewed and rated 60 positive images and 60 negative images, interspersed with 60 images of neutral facial expressions."

Lastly, the researchers compared all of the data from each participant's MIDUS questionnaires, his or her nightly "phone diary" information, and neuroimages from the fMRI brain scans.

Taken together, the research findings suggest that "people whose left amygdala held on to negative stimuli for fewer seconds were more likely to report more positive and fewer negative emotions in their daily lives—which spilled over to a more enduring well-being over time."

"One way to think about it is the longer your brain holds on to a negative event, or stimuli, the unhappier you report being," Puccetti, a Ph.D. candidate in UMiami's Department of Psychology, said in the news release. "Basically, we found that the persistence of a person's brain in holding on to a negative stimulus is what predicts more negative and less positive daily emotional experiences. That, in turn, predicts how well they think they're doing in their life."

"Individuals demonstrating less persistent activation patterns in the left amygdala to aversive stimuli reported more frequent positive and less frequent negative affect (NA) in daily life," the authors explain. "Further, daily positive affect (PA) served as an indirect link between left amygdala persistence and PWB. These results clarify important connections between individual differences in brain function, daily experiences of affect, and well-being."

"It may be that for individuals with greater amygdala persistence, negative moments may become amplified or prolonged by imbuing unrelated moments that follow with a negative appraisal," the authors speculate. "This brain-behavior link between left amygdala persistence and daily affect can inform our understanding of more enduring, long-term evaluations of well-being."

Less amygdala persistence following adverse events in day-to-day life may predict having a more upbeat, positive affect in daily life, which, over time, may create an upward spiral of psychological well-being for the long haul. "Thus, day-to-day experiences of positive affect comprise a promising intermediate step that links individual differences in neural dynamics to complex judgments of psychological well-being," the authors conclude.

Image of "Negative Mood Linked to Prolonged Amygdala Activity" (Puccetti et al., JNeurosci 2021) via EurekAlert