While optimism helps promote health and well-being, there is a thin line between reality and unrealistic hopes about life (Myers, 2013). What sets optimism apart from other personality traits is that, like a. Optimism has an overlap with the mild, more contentment-oriented definition of happiness we came up earlier. As such, optimism is the result of genetics, environment and experience. When people have such high hopes, and then they fail and those hopes are dashed (whether it be by losing a bet or giving your family cancer from your secondhand smoke), they can fall into depression. Lessons learned in this section: Being optimistic is the tendency to expect things to turn out for the best most of the time. Illusory optimism may seem harmless, since it keeps us all happy, but it can be quite the opposite it makes us more vulnerable to the things that we don't think can harm us, since we believe we are immune to these misfortunes. An important question is whether this advantage extends to biological functions, such as immune activity, and to physical health. From betting on our favorite sports team despite their losing record, to spending hundreds of dollars on piano lessons for our children because we KNOW they are the next undiscovered Mozarts, we have all way overestimated our success/luck in life. Dispositional optimismthe belief that the future generally holds positive but not negative eventsappears to confer widespread benefit in terms of psychosocial well-being. The term has many definitions but in its most. This includes over-estimating the likelihood of positive events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events. Appropriately then, optimism has been frequently linked to better physiological and psychological well-being.
This type of unrealistic optimism is better known as "illusory optimism", and almost all of us are guilty. Optimism bias is the demonstrated systematic tendency for people to be overly optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. Others contend that optimism is more an explanatory style it resides in. People are far less likely to foresee negative events happening to themselves, such as a car wreck, being fired, or developing an addiction, than they are to others. To many psychologists, optimism reflects the belief that the outcomes of events or experiences will generally be positive. Most people are predisposed to optimism over pessimism, even to the point of having an unrealistic optimistic view of the future.
0 kommentar(er)
