The subjective distribution of growth rates of aggregate consumption is characterized by pessimism if it is first-order stochastically dominated by the objective distribution. Uniform pessimism is a leftward translation of the objective distribution of the logarithm of the growth rate. The subjective distribution is characterized by doubt if it is mean-preserving spread of the objective distrib...

OBJECTIVE To test the measurement equivalence of the Youth Life Orientation Test (YLOT) in children with cancer (N = 199) and healthy controls (N = 108), and to examine optimism and pessimism as predictors of children's health-related quality of life (HRQL). METHODS Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted to establish the two factor structure of the YLOT and to test for metric invari...

This research examines whether maternal optimism/pessimism is associated with unplanned Cesarean section deliveries in China. If so, does the association remain after controlling for clinical factors associated with C-sections? A sample of 227 mostly primiparous women in the third trimester of pregnancy was surveyed in a large tertiary care hospital in Beijing, China. Post-delivery data were co...

The theory of Atanassov’s intuitionistic fuzzy sets has been developed and has been successfully applied in the field of multiple criteria analysis. However, there is a lack of information about the role of optimism and pessimism on subjective judgments and cognitive dissonance accompanying the decision process. This paper presents a new method of reducing cognitive dissonance and relating opti...

“Computing the pessimism” means bounding the overestimation produced by an inclusion function. There are two important distinctions with classical error analysis. First, we do not consider the image by an inclusion function but the distance between this image and the exact image (in the set-theoretical sense). Second, the bound is computed over a infinite set of intervals. To our knowledge, thi...

People find unexpected bad news aversive and often brace themselves by predicting the worst. Three experiments examined whether the pessimism is influenced by personal need. Students who differed in financial need learned that a billing error meant that some students would receive an additional bill from their university. Financially needy students were consistently pessimistic in predicting th...

This study examined two senses in which pessimism might be a risk factor for depressive mood among older adults. The first was that a pessimistic explanatory style would predict changes toward depressive mood when combined with stressful life events. The second was that predictive pessimism, or thinking that bad events will happen in the future, would predict changes in depressive symptoms. We ...

In the present study we elucidate the emotional and executive control interactions that might underlie optimism and pessimism. Participants completed a self-report measure of optimism/pessimism and performed an emotion faces categorisation task and an emotion n-back task in which they indicated whether each of a series of faces had the same or a different emotional expression (happy, sad, neutr...