Paul,

Hoping you'll find this reassuring. I'm a social psychologist and one of the things that is well known in our field is that negativity in any form produces stronger results than positivity.

The general consensus is that the reason for this is that negativiy tends to produce strong, compulsive behavior.

Positivity works on a different principle entirely. It produces more diffuse behavior that is more difficult to measure or predict. It tends to be fainter (people rarely feel extreme positivity, which is good, because mania can be destructive). However, it occurs far more often and seems to have the net effect of counterbalancing and healing the negative.

If you're keen on reading further you might look up Roy Baumeister's paper "Bad is Stronger than Good" on Google Scholar, which is the first to seriously identify this phenomenon. You might also look up Barbara Frederickson's work; you can simply google the Broaden-and-Build theory of positive emotions.

Importantly, the lesson from both sources is that bad and good aren't mirrors of each other. They operate on different psychological principles. One produces powerful reactions - and incidentally part of this is that it captures attention longer and produces more reading.

The other produces lighter reactions but generally outweighs the negative through sheer force of numbers.

Happy to talk about it further if you're keen on it. I suspect you're familiar with some of this stuff already, given your degree and your topics of interest.