Negative sentiment override
A state in which accumulated negativity colours how one person reads everything the other does, so neutral or even positive acts are taken as hostile.
What drives it
It protects against further hurt by assuming the worst in advance. It explains why good-faith efforts fail: the filter, not the behaviour, decides the meaning.
How it shows
Work
Once a CEO has decided the CMO is disloyal, her question in a meeting is 'undermining', her silence is 'checked out' and her good quarter is 'luck'. Staff notice that nothing she does can land. The same happens in reverse when employees have stopped trusting leadership: every all-hands is spin.
Relationships
'Do you want tea?' is heard as 'you're implying I'm tired'. A present is suspicious. Friends hear one partner describe the other only through their worst moments.
Self
You are keeping a file. You put their good acts down to motives and their bad acts down to character, and you feel a flicker of disappointment when they do something kind because it doesn't fit.
What tells it apart
Confirmation bias: Confirmation bias is a general cognitive tendency; the override is targeted at one person, charged with weariness or contempt, and can flip to positive override when the relationship recovers.
Fundamental attribution error: In the override the asymmetry is between this person and everyone else: the same remark from a friend would be read kindly.
Mental filter: Mental filter is a distortion about life in general; the override fastens on one relationship.
A test
Ask how you would read the exact same act from someone you like; if the readings differ sharply, the override is doing the work.
Questions to carry
- If someone well liked had done the same thing, how would it have been read?
- Whose kind gestures have I stopped being able to see as kind, and when did that start?
How strong the research is
moderate. The idea that overall feeling biases how a partner's behaviour is read has reasonable support; Gottman's specific claims rest mostly on his own data.
Where it comes from
Robert Weiss, 1980; developed by John Gottman, 1990s