It ’s possible to learn to be more optimistic

By Christian Jarrett Optimists have good reason to be optimistic – research tells us that their sunny outlook means that they are likely to live longer, healthier, happier lives compared with others who have a habit of seeing a darker future ahead. This has led positive psychologists to attempt to teach optimism, so that more people might get to benefit from its apparent positive effects. But can you really learn to see the future more brightly? By combining findings from all the relevant existing optimism intervention trials, published and unpublished, a new meta-analysis in The Journal of Positive Psychology provides us with the best answer available today. There’s reason for hope – it seems we can learn to be more optimistic. But don’t get too carried away. Many interventions only increase optimism a little bit, and probably only for a little while. John Malouff and Nicola Schutte at the University of New England in Australia scoured the research literature and contacted psychologists in the field to try to find all published and unpublished trials that had attempted to increase people’s optimism in some way, and that had included a control group, and that had randomly allocated participants to the intervention or the control condition. They ended up with 29 studies (just one unpublished) involving collectively over three thousand participants. Most of the studies had used an established optimism intervention known as The Best Possible Self Inte...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Positive psychology Source Type: blogs