OBJECTIVE A sense of optimism, which derives from the ways individuals explain causes of daily events, has been shown to protect health, whereas pessimism has been linked to poor physical health. We examined prospectively the relationship of an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style with coronary heart disease incidence in the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study, an ongoing cohort of ol...

Prior research has reported that dispositional optimists tend to take approach-type coping strategies in response to health threats, and as a result, experience positive health benefits. This study investigated whether dispositional optimism or pessimism interacted with the importance that a participant assigned to stressful events to predict their coping behavior. College students (N = 178) pa...

Prior pessimism about reuse in software engineering research may have been a result of using the wrong methods to measure things.

Social comparisons typically lead to two kinds of biases: A comparative optimism bias (i.e., a tendency for people to view themselves as more likely than others to be the beneficiaries of positive outcomes) or a comparative pessimism bias (i.e., a tendency for people to view themselves as less likely than others to be such beneficiaries); rarely are people fully calibrated in terms of how they ...

We study players interacting under the veil of ignorance, who have -- coarse beliefs represented as subsets opponents' actions. analyze when these follow $\max \min$ or $\max\max$ decision criteria, which we identify with pessimistic optimistic attitudes, respectively. Explicitly formalizing attitudes and how reason interactively characterize behavioral implications related to common belief in ...

As is convincingly demonstrated in the target article (Simons et al., 2016, this issue), despite the numerous forms of brain training that have been tested and touted in the past 15 years, there’s little to no evidence that currently existing programs produce lasting, meaningful change in the performance of cognitive tasks that differ from the trained tasks. As detailed by Simons et al., numero...

This study investigates the influence of a decision aid on decision makers’ model-based choices, emotions during the use of the model, and attitudes towards the model. A time allocation decision model was biased to purposefully provide optimistic or pessimistic criterion levels, on which subjects based their allocations. The results of our experiment indicate that the degree of ‘‘optimism’’ and...

BACKGROUND Research suggests that reports of interpersonal discrimination result in poor mental health. Because personality characteristics may either confound or mediate the link between these reports and mental health, there is a need to disentangle its role in order to better understand the nature of discrimination-mental health association. We examined whether hostility, anger repression an...

Improving our understanding of hopelessness is central to suicide prevention. This is the first study to investigate whether generalized expectancies for the future Predicting Hopelessness 2 (optimism/pessimism) and specific future-oriented cognitions (future thinking) interact to predict hopelessness and dysphoria. To this end, participants completed measures of future thinking, optimism/pessi...