People with negative biases tend to focus heavily on negative thoughts or outcomes. Psychologist Sonia Bishop of the University of California, Berkeley says that negativity bias is common in individuals with high anxiety.

"If you ask people to say how likely is it that something bad will happen to me in the future or something good or if you ask people to pay attention to different things, what you'll find quite often is that Individuals high in anxiety will show this tendency to find it easier to switch their attention towards something which is negative, that they may remember more negative things, and that they may also judge that negative events are more likely happen to them in the future."

Bishop says that this can influence our decision-making and risk-taking behaviors.

"We think that that may well be influenced by some of these problems of decision-making. Because if you can't understand why something happened that seemed to be very negative, then maybe you would be much more worried about negative events happening in the future."