The negativity bias is encoded in language.

Abstract

This study investigates the relationship between emotional valence, phonemic bigram surprisal, and memory in American English. It reveals that negative words carry more Shannon's information-a measure of the transitional probability of phonemes within a word - than neutral or positive words and that increased information is associated with better memory performance. Specifically, words with negative valence and high surprisal were associated with increased hit rates and d' scores in an existing memory recognition experiment. These findings offer insights into the interaction between language structure and cognitive processing, with broader implications for memory and the evolution of communication.