Pratto, F. & John, O.P., Automatic vigilance: The attention-grabbing power of negative social information., JPSP, 1991, 61, 380-391.

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People assign more weight to events that negative implications for them. Losses loom larger than gains. There is more urgency to address negative influences. Based on this study it appears there is an automatic cognitive system that directs attention toward negative stimuli

Previous research suggests that emotions are initially based on a persons primary appraisal of a situation as "good for me" or "bad for me". People can make evaluations without even recognition. This study proposes that people evaluate good and bad information at different rates.

Experiment 1
Subjects were asked to name the color that a word was printed in. They measured the time it took to identify the color (for a series of negative and positive adjectives that had previously rated for agreeableness).

Results
Subjects took 29ms longer to name the colors of negative words than postive words.

Experiment 2
They repeated number 1 but afterwards asked the students to recall as many words as they could.

Results
Subjects recalled twice as many undesirable than desireable traits. Since people were focused longer on the words (see exp 1), they remembered them better. Undesirable traits attract more attention than desirable traits.

Experiment 3
One issue was whether the base usage rates of the negative and positive words caused the delay in comprehension. So they added more words to remove this potential bias and tested again. The results showed no base rate effect.

Discussion
85% of subjects showed this automatic vigilence effect. Perhaps automatic vigilence can lead to negative bias in evaluation and selective memory of negative information. It could explain why negative informatin about stereotypes is remembered better than positive information.