"We know why optimists do better than pessimists," says Scheier. We were fortunate to get the paper published in a journal, Health Psychology, that enabled a lot of researchers to become familiar with the scale, findings, and ideas. We also wanted to show that differences in optimism and pessimism predicted some health-relevant outcomes, so we explored the development of physical symptoms reported among a group of undergraduates during a particularly stressful portion of the academic semester. This became part of the purpose of our original paper too. Along with that came the job of establishing the statistical characteristics, or psychometric properties, of the scale.
The power of optimism pdf#
We couldn't find anything that was right on the mark, so we set out to make our own measure for dispositional optimism using a self-report questionnaire ( PDF of updated version).
Once we knew what we wanted to study, we looked around the literature to see if there was a scale that assessed dispositional optimism that was consistent with how we viewed the construct. What were your goals? Was there a research gap you were hoping to fill back then? And voila! We found ourselves interested in dispositional optimism, which we define as the general expectation that good, versus bad, things will happen across important life domains. This confluence of events started us thinking about expectancies in a broader way that might be more reflective of stable expectancies for positive or negative things to occur. Our formal area of study in graduate school was also personality, and I started to hear the voice of my advisor, Arnie Buss, in my head gently pushing us to do what it was that we had been trained to do. A number of our colleagues in health psychology - my wife, Karen Matthews, included - urged or maybe even challenged us to consider applying some of our ideas to real-world settings, particularly those that might be relevant to well-being. We weren't interested in snakes or phobias per se but in how these expectations drove behaviors.Īt some point in the early 1980s, things changed. For example, we studied snake phobics who approached a boa constrictor in a cage. We focused on specific situations manipulated in controlled experimental contexts to validate our ideas.
Initially, we considered outcome expectancies in a very circumscribed way. We thought these expectancies played a role in the nature of the affect that was experienced and the person's subsequent behavior. The idea was, and still is, that when people encounter difficulties doing what it is that they intend to do, some sort of mental calculation takes place that results in the generation of an outcome expectancy - the person's subjective assessment of the likelihood that he or she will succeed.
The power of optimism how to#
We were trying to understand how to think about goal-directed behavior, and expectancies were an important part of our approach. He also assesses why their optimism scale was an instant hit in the scientific community, how their findings have been adapted by other researchers, and the future of our understanding of hope and well-being.Ĭhuck Carver from the University of Miami and I were doing research on human motivation. In the Q&A below, Scheier reflects on his influential work with Carver and shares how their humble study on human motivation ultimately inspired countless studies on mind-body interactions. After the paper, scientists had a method for seriously studying the healing powers of positive thinking. Just as importantly, by testing the effect of a personality variable on a person's physical health, Scheier and Carver helped bridge the gap between the worlds of psychology and biology.
Researchers immediately embraced the simple hopefulness test they included in the paper and their work has now been cited in at least 3,145 other published works. Carver's published their seminal study, "Optimism, Coping, and Health: Assessment and Implications of Generalized Outcome Expectancies" in Health Psychology. Oddly enough, three decades ago, the outlook for research on optimism didn't look very good. In just the last year, hundreds of academic papers have been published studying the health effects of expecting good things to happen, which researchers call "dispositional optimism." They've linked this positive outlook on life to everything from decreased feelings of loneliness to increased pain tolerance.
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