Page 75 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

44 Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilence

high-stress situations, people often display a substantially reduced ability
to hear, understand, and remember information.
Mental noise typically increases when people are exposed to risks asso-
ciated with negative psychological attributes (e.g., risks perceived to be
involuntary, not under one’s control, low in benefits, unfair, or dreaded
contribute greatly to mental noise). Because of mental noise, stressed and
upset people often

• Attend to no more than three messages at a time.
• Process information at four or more levels below their educational level.
• Focus their attention on information they hear first and last.

The Negative Dominance Model

The negative dominance model describes the processing of both negative and
positive information in high-concern and emotionally charged situations. In
general, the relationship between negative and positive information is asym-
metrical. In high-stress situations, negative information typically receives
significantly greater attention and weight. The negative dominance model is
consistent with a central theorem of modern psychology that people put greater
value on losses (negative outcomes) than on gains (positive outcomes).
One practical implication of the negative dominance model is it takes
several positive or solution-oriented messages to counterbalance one
negative message. On average, in high-concern or emotionally charged
situations, it takes three or more positive messages to counterbalance a
negative message.
Another practical implication of negative dominance theory is that
messages containing negatives (e.g., words such as no, not, never, noth-
ing, and none as well as words with negative connotations) tend to receive
closer attention, are remembered longer, and have greater impact than
messages containing positive words. The use of unnecessary negatives
in high-concern or emotionally charged situations can have the unin-
tended effect of drowning out positive or solution-oriented information.
Risk communications are often most effective when they focus on posi-
tive, constructive actions; on what is being done, rather than on what is
not being done.