BACKGROUND Prior research links optimism to physical health, but the strength of the association has not been systematically evaluated. PURPOSE The purpose of this study is to conduct a meta-analytic review to determine the strength of the association between optimism and physical health. METHODS The findings from 83 studies, with 108 effect sizes (ESs), were included in the analyses, using...

Optimism and pessimism are associated with important outcomes including health and depression. Yet it is unclear if these apparent polar opposites form a single dimension or reflect two distinct systems. The extent to which personality accounts for differences in optimism/pessimism is also controversial. Here, we addressed these questions in a genetically informative sample of 852 pairs of twin...

Optimism has been shown to be important in maintaining wellbeing into old age, but little is known about the sources of variation in optimism and its links to mental and somatic health. Optimism, mental, and self-rated health were measured in 3,053 twin individuals (501 MZF, 153 MZM, 274 DZF, 77 DZM, and 242 DZ opposite-sex twin pairs and 561 single twins) over 50 years using the life orientati...

OBJECTIVE optimism is an important variable that has consistently been shown to affect adjustment to quality of life in chronic diseases. This study aims to clarify if dispositional optimism exerts a moderating or a mediating influence on the personality traits-quality of life association, in Portuguese chronic patients. METHODS multiple regression models were used to test the moderation and ...

Optimism is associated with positive outcomes across many health domains, from cardiovascular disease to depression. However, we know little about cognitive processes underlying optimism in psychopathology. The present study tested whether the ability to vividly imagine positive events in one's future was associated with dispositional optimism in a sample of depressed adults. Cross-sectional an...

An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may affect beliefs about other people's futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here, we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicario...

The present research examined optimism's relation with total cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, and triglycerides. The hypothesis that optimism is associated with a healthier lipid profile was tested. The participants were 990 mostly white men and women from the Midlife in the United States study, who were, on average, 55.1 years old. Optimis...

Dispositional optimism is an individual characteristic that plays an important role in human experience. Optimists are people who tend to hold positive expectations for their future. Previous studies have focused on the neural basis of optimism, such as task response neural activity and brain structure volume. However, the functional connectivity between brain regions of the dispositional optim...

BACKGROUND Positive traits, such as life satisfaction, optimism, and core self-evaluation (CSE), have garnered increasing attention from researchers and professionals. However, the trilateral relationship among them remains unclear. OBJECTIVE This study examines the effect of dispositional optimism on life satisfaction and primarily verified the mediator role of CSEs. METHODS Six hundred th...

The increasing interest about dispositional optimism's role in health status and its positive modulating effect on health outcomes has led to a remarkable scientific production in the last decade. To date lot is known for which diseases optimism is relevant, instead much less is known about how optimism interacts with other factors, both biological and psychological, in determining health statu...