is more elaborate and complex than that of positivity. For instance, research indicates that negative vocabulary is more richly descriptive of the affective experience than that of positive vocabulary. Furthermore, there appear to be more terms employed to indicate negative emotions than positive emotions. The notion of negative differentiation is consistent with the mobilization-minimization hypothesis, which posits that negative events, as a consequence of this complexity, require a greater mobilization of cognitive resources to deal with the affective experience and a greater effort to minimize the consequences. Evidence Social judgments and impression formation Most of the early evidence suggesting a negativity bias stems from research on social judgments and impression formation, in which it became clear that negative information was typically more heavily weighted when participants were tasked with forming comprehensive evaluations and impressions of other target individuals. Generally speaking, when people are presented with a range of trait information about a target individual, the traits are neither "averaged" nor "summed" to reach a final impression. When these traits differ in terms of their positivity and negativity, negative traits disproportionately impact the final impression. This is specifically in line with the notion of negativity dominance (see "Explanations" above). As an example, a famous study by Leon Festinger and colleagues investigated critical factors in predicting friendship formation; the researchers concluded that whether or not people became friends was most strongly predicted by their proximity to one another. Ebbesen, Kjos, and Konecni, however, demonstrated that proximity itself does not predict friendship formation; rather, proximity serves to amplify the information that is relevant to the decision of either forming or not forming a friendship. Negative information is just as amplified as positive information by proximity. As negative information tends to outweigh positive information, proximity may predict a failure to form friendships even more so than successful friendship formation. One explanation that has been put forth as to why such a negativity bias is demonstrated in social judgments is that people may generally consider negative information to be more diagnostic of an individual's character than positive information, that it is more useful than positive information in forming an overall impression. This is supported by indications of higher confidence in the accuracy of one's formed impression when it was formed more on the basis of negative traits than positive traits. People consider negative information to be more important to impression formation and, when it is