Why does the brain mostly remember tragic, bad or embarassing memories instead of the happy ones
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It’s called the negative bias. Our brains seek out and remember particularly strong emotions. Mostly the negative ones – disgust, terror, shame, and so on. They register so strongly because in evolutionary terms, that kept you alive. One, in triggering the fight-flight-freeze reflex in the survival situation. And two, in ensuring you would stay away from whatever caused that – someone attacked you from a neighbouring tribe, a predator, you ate something poisonous, you did something horrible and it threatened your standing within the tribe.
The ratio in research is about 3:1* in terms of how much it weighs on you. In other words, for a parent, it’s a good rule of thumb to have three positive experiences with your kid for every 1 negative one. As a teacher or a coach, you have to create three positive experiences for your player or student before you’ve earned a criticism. The flip-side is that too many positives and you get toxic positivity, somewhere around 11:1, like it’s too much positivity and it doesn’t feel authentic anymore.
**As a note, the exact numbers have been debunked (the ones given by the original researchers), so use the ratios with a LOT of leeway depending on the person and the situation. I use this for ELI5 purposes.*
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