PSY 180

Lecture 4

Positive thinking

George Vaillant

• Harvard longitudinal study of 3% of their students– All WASPs, males– Started in the 1930’s– Most went to war and responded to a

questionnaire asking to describe in own words the “difficult wartime experiences” he had encountered

Peterson examined a random sample…

• Looked at how they explained the causes of bad events throughout the war– Scored them for pervasiveness

• Did they see the bad things as indicative of non changing flaws (possibly in himself too)?

– “I hated the military…” – pessimist

• Did they see the bad things distant from himself– “I was in danger in the military because I had no specific

task assigned to me” – optimist

What did they find?

• Optimism predicted good health– Especially around age 40 and 45 (r =.37)

Presidential election results

• The more optimistic candidate won 18/23 times between 1900 and 1988– Hasn’t predicted any since though- maybe

because elections got word of these studies and now everyone tries to be optimistic….

The Pollyanna Principle

• In thought, we focus on the positive

Support for the PP

• Table 5.1– Find a paper or two that goes into a few of

these in detail…

Selective attention to the negative

• When something bad happens or has the potential to happen, our consciousness gets directed to it

• Evolution has selected for people with these attributes– They will survive more than others

• The default to the positive plays out on a nonconscious level according to the PP

Optimism

• A mood or attitude associated with an expectation about the social or material future- one for which the evaluator regards as socially desirable, to his or her advantage or for his or her pleasure– No objective definition because it depends on

what the individual believes is desirable

History of optimism

• Is it human nature?– Sophocles and Nietzsche argued that it

prolongs suffering- face reality will ya?– Freud believed that optimism was all over the

place but leads to the denial of our instinctual nature and the denial or reality

– Freud argued that religions sold the idea of optimism

• “God will lead me through life and beyond”

Freud continued

• Optimism led to illusion– Psychodynamic ideas of Freud argued that a

healthy person needs to see the world as it is without illusions

• Thus by nature optimists are mentally unhealthy according to historical thought

• “reality testing” was done to test for psychological problems

– Must be realistic about the present and the future– Only modest expectations about the future would count

as realistic

Cognitive theorists

• Began to show that negativity led to depression and that positivity led to psychologically healthy people

• Taylor (1989) distinguished from optimism as an illusion vs optimism as a delusion– Illusions are responsive to reality– Delusions are not

Evolutionary optimism

• Maybe when we evolved the ability to think about the future, we needed something to counteract the fear and paralysis that accompanies thinking about death and mortality

Optimism

• Human nature?– Evolutionary approaches

• Individual differences– The idea that everyone varies on the amount

of optimism they have– We are not all simply evolutionarily optimists

Dispositional optimism

• Global expectation that good things will be plentiful and bad things scarce– Based on how people pursue goals– Aka “self-regulatory model”– In the face of adversity, do people believe

their goals can still be achieved?

• Measures using the Life Orientation task (LOT)– Has been linked to effective coping

Explanatory style

• How one explains the causes of bad events– External, unstable, and specific causes = optimism

• Related to learned helplessness

• Measured using – Attributional style questionairre

• Hypothetical events are given, asked the provide the one major cause

• Causes are then rated on internality, stability, and globility

– Content analysis procedure• Aka CAVE• Uses written or spoken records which allows for long term

studies

Optimistic explanatory style

• Related to good outcomes

• One exception– They underestimate the likelihood of bad

events

• Internality is the weakest linked aspect of explanatory style

LOT vs ASQ/CAVE

• Correlate strongly

• LOT is more expectations

• CAVE and ASQ are focused on HOW goals are brought about – Focus on the process not just the end result

like LOT

Hope

• 2 main aspects– Agency

• A determination that goals can be achieved

– Pathways• The belief that successful plans can be made to

reach goals

• Measured by a self-report scale

Little vs Big Optimism

• Little– Specific expectations in life– May be due to learning history– Like the explanatory style

• Big– Less specific – Could be about the country as a whole– Could be biologically driven– Beneficial because it leads to vigor and resilience– Like hope and dispositional optimism

• Could influence different aspects of health and well-being– Little- onset of injuries and diseases– Big- trajectory of severe illnesses

Optimism vs pessimism

• Seem to be independent of each other– Explanatory style for good events and bad events are

independent of each other• Odd note:

– Optimistic explanatory style is how one responds to bad events, not good ones

• May involve the perception of bad events happening

• Maybe they are measuring optimism wrong?– Optimists are currently defined as not depressed, not

failing, not ill– Why the focus on the absence of bad things? – Where is the presence of good things?

Typical learned helplessness expmt

• Animals or people that are exposed to aversive events that they cannot control vs animals or people that are exposed to aversive events that they can control vs animals or people that are not exposed to aversive events– The last two groups do not differ– Experience with uncontrollable events provides no

real benefit• Maybe optimism is the baseline unless there is a reason not

to be optimistic?

If the task gets difficult..

• Then having experience with aversive stimuli does matter– Learned hopefulness, learned

industriousness, learned mastery, learned relevance, learned resourcefulness

Unrealistic optimism

• Most underestimate their risk of experiencing illness or injury– May not allow for the individual to properly

prevent or plan for these things

• Seligman proposed the idea of flexible or complex optimism– People should be optimistic when the future

can be changed by positive thinking but not otherwise

Religions and optimism

• Religious texts that were more conservative were rated as more optimistic than liberal ones (Seligman 1993)

Parents and optimism

• Explanatory styles of parents and children converge

• If optimism is lost…?– Cognitive behavioral therapy

• Seeks to change the thoughts that accompany a pessimistic explanatory style to combat depression