  Prior work has revealed that positive words occur more frequently than
negative words in human expressions, which is typically attributed to
positivity bias, a tendency for people to report positive views of reality. But
what about the language used in negative reviews? Consistent with prior work,
we show that English negative reviews tend to contain more positive words than
negative words, using a variety of datasets. We reconcile this observation with
prior findings on the pragmatics of negation, and show that negations are
commonly associated with positive words in negative reviews. Furthermore, in
negative reviews, the majority of sentences with positive words express
negative opinions based on sentiment classifiers, indicating some form of
negation.
