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...

BACKGROUND Despite the growth in knowledge about coronary heart disease (CHD) risk factors, and the advances made in preventing and treating them, the incidence of CHD is still notably quite high. Research has concentrated on the physiological factors that present risks for CHD, but there is an increasing amount of evidence for the connection of mental health, personal traits and CHD. Data on t...

ings quite a remarkable finding: that the new Optimism-Pessimism scale of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) predicts no less a dependent variable than death itself. The finding is unusually important for 2 reasons: First, the obvious one is predicting a “hard” measure like mortality from a “mere” paper-andpencil psychological construct. The second is more subtle, and it com...

This research aims at combined and relative effect levels on anxiety of: (1) perceived risk, knowledge, optimism, pessimism, and social trust; and (2) four sub-variables of social trust among inhabitants concerning living on heavy metal contaminated soil. On the basis of survey data from 499 Chinese respondents, results suggest that perceived risk, pessimism, optimism, and social trust have ind...