Helle sees Yahya's controversial poems as a positive development the backlash, he thinks, is just a consequence of Muslim immigrants joining a society where people speak freely about their religions and criticize others in the mass media.
The positives rebound into proportional negatives – and we feel that backlash in our bodies as they receive distress signals from our brains.
Several campaign experts and strategists have attributed a surge in popularity for Senator John Edwards, who has vowed to stay positive, to a backlash against the negativity of his competitors.
The allegations against the producer Harvey Weinstein and others, while monstrous in their scope and detail, have led to the most positive kind of backlash: through the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, and the 50/50 by 2020 initiative, which aims to have male-female parity in the business world in two years.
Amazon's announcement this week that it will raise its minimum wage for workers in the United States and United Kingdom earned it a wave of positive publicity, but backlash is already growing as reports emerge that its new pay structure will do away with monthly bonuses and stock option awards.
Helle sees Yahya's controversial poems as a positive development – the backlash, he thinks, is just a consequence of Muslim immigrants joining a society where people speak freely about their religions and criticise others in the mass media.
Erika Rosenberg combated the backlash against positive psychology by asking, "What is positive about negative emotions?" Finally, Richard Davidson looked at research about decision making and applied it to decisions about when you should engaged in contemplative practices.
And the backlash against positive workplaces arises from the equally false assumption that being happy at work means being "relentlessly positive all the time" as the Guardian put it.
Predictably, after the first rush of positive responses came a backlash of spoofs ("Iraqis, We will never bomb your country, We love you" reads the meme under a picture of George W. Bush) and suggestions that the campaign smacks of "slacktivism" — lazy, couch-surfing activism — of the kind that is said to have propelled the by-now famously infamous Kony 2012 video.
