 This episode reminded me of one we did a few years back called Reasons to be Cheerful. We spoke with the journalist John Tierney, who learned early on as a reporter that the best way to get a reader's attention was to focus on the dramatic, the frightening, the violent. But I didn't really understand it until I read Roy Baumeister's paper, Bad is Stronger than Good. Roy Baumeister, I'm a research psychologist, a professor of psychology at the University of Queensland.