Purpose Optimism, a personality trait defined as holding general positive beliefs regarding the future, has been associated to improved physical health and longevity. One of the underlying mechanisms may be a reduced physiological stress response. Previous studies found that optimism was related to a lower blood pressure response to experimental stress and to a lower cortisol awakening response...

The relationship between subjective invulnerability and optimism bias in risk appraisal, and their comparative association with indices of risk activity, substance use and college adjustment problems was assessed in a sample of 350 (M (age) = 20.17; 73% female; 93% White/European American) emerging adults. Subjective invulnerability was measured with the newly devised adolescent invulnerability...

Previous research has indicated that both cognitive and behavioral variables mediate the positive effect of optimism on quality of life (QOL), yet few attempts have been made to accommodate these constructs into a single explanatory framework. Adopting Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build perspective, we examined the relationships between optimism, self-rated health, resilience, exercise, and QOL in...

PURPOSE This study investigated the use of private prayer among middle-aged and older patients as a way of coping with cardiac surgery and prayer's relationship to optimism. DESIGN AND METHODS The measure of prayer included three aspects: (a) belief in the importance of private prayer, (b) faith in the efficacy of prayer on the basis of previous experiences, and (c) intention to use prayer to...

Learning methods vary in the optimism or pessimism with which they regard the informativeness of learned knowledge. Pessimism is implicit in hypothesis testing, where we wish to draw cautious conclusions from experimental evidence. However, this paper demonstrates that optimism in the utility of derived rules may be the preferred bias for learning systems themselves. We examine the continuum be...

The U.S. Army Reserve struggles with retention and faces difficulties with soldier turnover. The intent of the study was to assess key psychological variables such as optimism and hope to establish how those traits might impact soldiers' level of organizational commitment and turnover intention in the Army. The sample consisted of 124 U.S. soldiers selected from an Army Reserve unit in Houston,...

Introduction Maternal and fetal characteristics can be effect on optimism which vary among different cultures and countries. So the aim of this study was to determine Prenatal Optimism and its relationship with fetal and maternal characteristics in primiparous women. Materials and Methods This research study was a descriptive cross - sectional. The statistical populations consisted of 240 p...