The Upshot Is It Pays to Be Upbeat

Now that the future is here, how fitting that researchers are finally getting a grip on optimism, the curious human habit of expecting good things to happen, often in defiance of reality.

Just in time for millennial philosophizing, this hallmark of our wondering and worrying species is attracting unprecedented attention from social scientists, who are not known for accentuating the positive.

They have largely avoided the subject since the last turn of the century, when the fictional Pollyanna insisted that everything was superlative and thus became a synonym for inane cheerfulness. So disreputable was optimism that one of modernity’s most influential thinkers, Sigmund Freud, equated it with ignorance.

But optimism research is in vogue, and new findings debunk myths about the misunderstood trait while also offering a helping hand to world-weary pessimists. Dozens of recent studies show that optimists do better than pessimists in work, school and sports, suffer less depression, achieve more goals, respond better to stress, wage more effective battles against disease and, yes, live longer.

One’s optimism level, which begins to take shape around age 10, is largely a product of how one’s parents respond to the setbacks that children endure, according to some studies. Yet optimistic thinking can be systematically taught to downcast youths, helping them stave off depression, research suggests. Likewise, rigorous training has been shown to foster optimism in certain professionals, such as soldiers who defuse bombs.

But how much optimism is optimal?

Surveys and lab exercises show that people again and again overestimate their chances of success at various tasks.

Some researchers see this “optimistic bias” as a dangerous streak of irrationality that should frequently be discouraged, the impetus for unreasonably risky behavior. Others argue that even unfounded optimism can be highly useful, helping people tackle daunting challenges.

Among those with that view is Shelley Taylor, a UCLA psychologist who has done numerous studies in the field. Optimism is an “underrated resource,” she said. “It gives you much more than people imagine it does.”

The popularity of optimism research has convinced some scholars that psychology should focus less on misery and more on why things go right.

“Social science now finds itself in almost total darkness about the qualities that make life most worth living,” said Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist and past president of the American Psychological Assn., in a 1998 speech.

Over the last three decades, he said, citing another scholar’s spadework, there were 46,000 papers in the psychology literature on depression--and just 400 on joy. But 21st century psychology, he predicted, “will become a science of human strength and of personal fulfillment.”

Indeed, the psychological association’s flagship journal starts the year with a special issue co-edited by Seligman and devoted to optimism and “positive psychology”--an idea, perhaps surprisingly, that has generated controversy.

The optimism research bandwagon, as one psychologist calls it, is getting a push from the economic prosperity that has boosted U.S. consumer confidence to record highs. For instance, the John Templeton Foundation has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars funding and promoting optimism research and is co-publishing a book next spring on recent findings. The financier for whom the foundation is named has been described as a pure optimist: He sought out undervalued companies with bright futures.

Pessimism and Violence Linked

Perhaps no research finding quite lifts the spirits like the observation that optimists live longer than pessimists. One reason may be that optimists do a better job of staying out of harm’s way. So concluded a recent study drawing on records from a project begun eight decades ago involving 1,800 boys and girls in California.

By the 1990s, about half of the men and a third of the women in the study had died. Those who gave optimistic answers to essay questions when they were young lived an average of two years longer than did their pessimistic counterparts.

Pessimistic people appeared more prone to accidents and violence, including car wrecks, household mishaps, even homicide.

“From what I’m able to figure out, pessimistic people are in bad moods,” said the lead author of the 1998 study, psychologist Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan. “And when you’re in a bad mood, you’re more likely to do risky things,” because you’re either distracted or downright reckless.

The link between pessimism and early traumatic death in the study was stronger for men than women, and that finding jibes with responses that Peterson gets from college students when he asks how they deal with a bad mood: Women tend to stay home and ruminate and eat, while men do something reckless, he has found. “So women have eating disorders and depression, and men get drunk and wrap their cars around utility poles,” he said.

Other research suggests that optimism can protect against more insidious harm. Peterson, Seligman and others, teaming with Harvard Medical School psychiatrist George Vaillant, examined data from a 40-year study involving about 100 men who graduated from Harvard College between 1939 and 1944. Compared with the pessimists, more of the optimists were still alive in the 1980s, and among the living they were healthier.

The health differences between the optimists and pessimists did not begin to show up until the men were over 45, suggesting that a positive mental outlook somehow slowed aging’s physical toll, protecting the men for a time against heart disease and other ailments.

Other evidence that optimists live longer has been gathered by Taylor and co-workers, who studied 78 men with AIDS beginning in the late 1980s. Those who indicated that they had a realistic view of their disease’s course died an average of nine months sooner than those who were more optimistic about postponing the end. And the researchers say they ruled out other reasons for the optimists’ longer lives, such as less severe illness to begin with.

Taylor argues that an optimistic frame of mind actually modulates the nervous system in a way that bolsters immune-system defenses. And indeed, in yet another study, the researchers found that among first-year UCLA law students, the optimists had higher levels of disease-fighting killer cells in their blood than did the pessimists.

It might seem contrary to good sense that people benefit from unfounded optimism. After all, distinguishing between reality and illusion is a touchstone of sanity.

But some social scientists have generated controversy by reporting evidence for what is probably the central paradox of positive thinking: Clinging to the belief in a positive future against reasonable odds sometimes makes it happen.

Naturally, that may often occur just because over-optimists keep trying--a variation on the old saw that quitters never win. But there appears to be more to it.

For instance, in a report published last year about men infected with the AIDS virus, Taylor and co-workers found that the optimists had remained symptom-free longer than had the pessimists, whose assessment of their medical condition was actually more in line with clinical data.

Generally, as many commentators have pointed out, improvements in AIDS treatments over the years are a reminder that seemingly once-unrealistic hopes can yield to justifiable optimism.

Taylor, author of the 1989 book “Positive Illusions,” said researchers know very little about how such an “optimistic bias” might help the body’s defenses. The key, she said, is that such unrealism “isn’t necessarily bad. It can be wonderful.”

But this view has its critics. A false sense of security can be dangerous when it comes to taking physical risks, says Neil Weinstein, a psychologist at Rutgers University.

Epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases are fueled in part by people who make overly optimistic assumptions about their sexual partners, and drunk drivers hold distorted views of their abilities behind the wheel.

“You can think of many instances in which people’s underestimation of risk can get them into serious trouble,” said Weinstein.

In the popular imagination, optimists have long been portrayed as foolishly oblivious to problems. Typifying this notion is the fictional Dr. Pangloss, who in 1759 fleshed out Voltaire’s view that optimism is a “mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.”

But not all optimists are Panglossian. Numerous studies show that optimists, far from protecting their fragile vision of the world, confront trouble head-on, while it is pessimists who bury their heads in the sand of denial.

In a 1993 study of women newly diagnosed with breast cancer, the women with an optimistic disposition were more likely to acknowledge the seriousness of the disease, experienced less distress and took more active steps to cope with it.

“Pessimism was associated with denial and a giving-up response,” said Charles Carver of the University of Miami, who conducted the study with Michael Scheier of Carnegie Mellon University and others.

“Optimism was associated with positively reframing the situation, with women believing, ‘This is not going to go away, so let me make the best of it I can,’ ” Carver said.

Also debunking the denial myth is research showing that optimists are more open to learning they might be at risk of developing a disease. Optimists, he said, “are more likely to accept the reality of a health challenge . . . and more likely to search out information about meaningful health threats.”

Mental Outlook’s Childhood Roots

Lending a touch of credibility to the expression that some people are “born optimists,” studies of twins show that people with the same genetic makeup frequently have similar optimism levels.

But researchers have little idea whether genes play a direct role in shaping one’s mental outlook or, instead, endow people with biological traits such as high intelligence or physical prowess that might engender success and thus a positive outlook.

Because experts believe that no less than half of one’s optimistic tendency is nurtured, however, research probes its roots in childhood experience.

A soon-to-be-published study co-written by Vanderbilt University psychologist Judy Garber found that young adolescents often share their mother’s outlook, evidently because they learn her style of interpreting events, especially negative ones.

Children with what is known as a pessimistic explanatory style--they blame errors on deep personal flaws and dismiss triumphs as lucky breaks--were more likely to have been told their mistakes were caused by overarching deficiencies in their makeup. Disciplining children by inducing guilt or temporarily withdrawing affection also fostered pessimistic tendencies.

“If parents are negative, critical, blaming, then the child is going to learn that’s how to explain things in the world,” Garber said.

At the same time, she and other researchers have clearly shown that reality also matters. Children who endure hardship and tragedy, from sickness to divorcing parents to a death in the family, are also prone to pessimistic thinking.

If Seligman and others are correct, the consequences of pessimistic thinking in childhood may be broader than is usually acknowledged. They are studying the origins of optimism and pessimism with an eye toward reducing what some have called the “epidemic of depression” among the young.

Between 12% and 15% of children endure a bout of depression by age 18, and that appears to be substantially higher than the toll on previous generations, according to government data.

Supporting the theory that pessimism can be a prelude to depression is a 1998 study by University of Wisconsin psychologist Lyn Abramson. She found that college students with a pessimistic thinking style were twice as likely as optimists to say they had been depressed before.

Moreover, among those students who said they had never been depressed, 17% of the pessimists and just 1% of the optimists went on to become clinically depressed within the next three years--the first clinical evidence that pessimism appears to increase vulnerability to depression, Abramson said.

The key point, she said, was that an optimism deficit was not just a symptom of depression, but seemed to play a role in causing it. “The lack of positive bias can predispose you to depression,” she said.

While the high rate of depression among American youths at century’s end stands out as a cautionary tale amid the prosperity hoopla, University of Pennsylvania researchers are experimenting with ways to prevent the problem by arming children with optimism.

The program for fifth- and sixth-graders--described in Seligman’s 1995 book, “The Optimistic Child”--consists of 12 group sessions led by a counselor, who tries to help depression-prone children not be so hard on themselves. Among other things, they go through exercises featuring a cartoon character named Gloomy Greg, who reacts to being cut from the baseball team by thinking, “I have no athletic ability.”

A teacher explains why that is a self-destructive version of events--too sweeping, too harsh and too focused on forces beyond one’s control--and offers a more flexible explanation that keeps hope alive for future at-bats, such as a need to practice more.

In a test of 118 at-risk children, those who went through the program had 50% less depression over 2 1/2 years than those who received no special attention.

Garber cautions against going overboard, lest children merely view life though rose-colored wraparounds. “What you want to teach children is to be realistic, not unrealistically optimistic,” she said.

A Positive Psychology

It remains to be seen whether behavior experts will heed Seligman’s call for a “positive” psychology dedicated to better understanding and even encouragement of virtues like altruism, wisdom, integrity and leadership. But the notion has sparked criticism from colleagues, who worry that psychologists will be turned into morality police or will shun their duty to ease suffering.

“Since it is almost certainly easier to change the way people think about the world than it is to change the world, my concern is that . . . positive psychology will develop techniques to tolerate intolerable living conditions,” said Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College.

Peterson of the University of Michigan said he endorses the idea of positive psychology but fears that it “might be misunderstood by people to mean we’ve solved racism, homelessness, AIDS.”

Also, researchers say pessimism can sometimes be constructive. Connoisseurs of futility, pessimists tend to be sensitive to trouble and rather prudent, and thus may serve as sentinels of problems too lowly for bounding optimists to notice.

Nonetheless, solving problems is itself an optimistic impulse, ingrained in our biology ever since we had brains sophisticated enough to plan ahead, evolutionary psychologists say. Primed by eons of evolutionary trial and error, they say, we are inclined to hope for the best in this life and count on even better in an afterlife.

“We seem to have a moderate design defect in thinking that things will work out,” said Lionel Tiger, an anthropologist at Rutgers and an early proponent of optimism research.

However researchers measure it, Peterson said, “optimism . . . is linked to desirable characteristics--happiness, perseverance, achievement and health.”