8/24/2023 0 Comments Best books on optimismIt turns out that in the short term the optimistic law students often had a compromised immune system. She has also done some work looking at immune system functioning, measuring the immune system in optimists and pessimist with some surprising results.īasically, she took a group of law students, studied their immune systems over a period of time, and came across an interesting anomaly, which she believes that she can explain. She is looking at this at a behavioural level rather than through brain states. There is a can-do attitude which is absolutely the optimistic mind-set, and which translates into their actions. She thinks that this persistence at a task is one of the key things that help optimists to become more successful in life, because they simply try harder and stick with things for longer. What she found was that optimistic people were more likely to spend time trying to solve it and not to give up. In her case she would give them a variety of anagrams, including one which is impossible to solve. For example, there is one simple experiment that she had done which we also replicated in my own laboratory, which is to give people a questionnaire so you can divide the groups into optimists and pessimists. But Segerstrom makes the strong point that optimism is also about what you do. A lot of self-help books make the assumption that optimism and pessimism is all about the way we think. One of the things that she has found out through her research, and what she writes about in her book, is that optimism isn’t just about thinking. Segerstrom is one of the top psychologists working on optimism and pessimism. The Glass Half-Full by Suzanne Segerstrom takes those scientific studies further, and shows us that being an optimist can help you get ahead in life. So that is another way of picking up a positive or negative thinking style, but based very much on neural activity. The interesting thing is that you also find that pattern in monkeys and a lot of primates. Conversely, when they are more anxious or fearful you find more activity in the right-hand side of the brain. There has been a finding that, generally speaking, when people are in a more positive state you find far more activity in the left-hand side of the brain. This basically just measures the electrical activity in the brain. We can use something called EEG – which is electroencephalography. How do you go about actually seeing what is going on in someone’s brain? This is what psychologists call a trait measure – a predisposition to respond in a particular way. ![]() So if I measure how your brain reacts to something, the chances are you will have a similar reaction a few months down the line. The interesting thing is that those patterns of activity are also fairly enduring within the same individuals. And you can find different patterns of brain activity going on. For example, I might ask people to look at particular scenes or to watch short video clips of, say, something very positive and happy or something negative. We can look at what happens when people are observing or thinking about very positive or negative things. Another way of assessing this is by looking at what is actually happening in people’s brains. ![]() How they respond determines whether they can be viewed as an optimist or a pessimist. It is 10 simple questions asking people how they feel about the future in terms of positive or negative. One is the Life Orientation Test, which is seen as the standard measure of optimism. And there are a lot of standardised questionnaires we can use. One way we can do it is by simply asking people – either talking to them or doing a structured interview. How do you think we can scientifically work out if someone is an optimist or not? So an optimist is someone who is aware that even though things are likely to go wrong occasionally, they will be able to cope with them. That optimism is having a generally positive feeling about how things are going to work out, but not necessarily believing that everything is going to work out perfectly for you. But the kind of optimism that psychological research shows is actually of benefit is more of a realistic optimism. One is that a lot of people think that optimism is about being overly positive about everything and believing that everything is going to turn out very well. But there are a number of issues which are important to distinguish. Optimism is really about having a very positive attitude towards the future. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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