Pollyana was right, research shows.
Optimism--at least reasonable optimism--can pay dividends as wide-ranging as health, longevity, job success and higher scores on achievement tests.
Pessimism not only has the opposite effect but also seems to be at play in such psychological disorders as extreme shyness and depression.
The new research is an outgrowth of earlier work on the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. That early work concentrated largely on how individuals tend to conform to others` expectations of them, a phenomenon known as the
``Pygmalion effect.`` Researchers have found the Pygmalion effect is more pervasive than had been thought. The new work looks at people`s expectations about their own lives and finds that the power of expectations goes beyond mere achievement to visceral, emotional qualities.
``Our expectancies not only affect how we see reality but also affect the reality itself,`` says Edward E. Jones, a psychologist at Princeton University, who reviewed the research on expectancy in a recent issue of Science.
Michael F. Scheier, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has found that optimists handle stress better than pessimists do. In a report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Scheier wrote that optimists tend to respond to disappointments such as being turned down for a job by formulating a plan of action and asking other people for help and advice. Pessimists more often react to such difficulties by trying to forget the whole thing or assuming that there is nothing they can do to change things, an attitude optimists adopted only when there objectively was nothing that could be done.
In one of the more hotly pursued lines of investigation, psychologists are tracking the importance of how people explain their failures to themselves. People tend to have a habitual explanatory style, a typical way of explaining the events that befall them, according to work by Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Pessimists, Seligman found, tend to construe bad events such as flunking an exam or giving a party that flops as resulting from a personal deficit that will plague them forever in everything they do. Others see the same setbacks more optimistically, as being caused by mistakes that can be remedied. They believe that they can make the necessary changes.
Most people mix a pessimistic and an optimistic outlook to some degree. The new findings apply strongly to people at the extremes, who most clearly exemplify one style or the other.
Work by several researchers has shown that people who tend to blame themselves for their misfortunes are more susceptible to disease.
George Valliant, a psychiatrist at Dartmouth Medical School, and Christopher Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, worked with Seligman to study 99 members of the Harvard graduating classes of 1939 to 1944. The Harvard men had been interviewed on their return from World War II about their war experiences and have had physical examinations every five years since their graduation.
Those men whose postwar interviews indicated that they had been optimistic in college were healthier in later life than the pessimists were.
``The men`s explanatory style at age 25 predicted their health at 65,``
Seligman said. ``Around age 45 the health of the pessimists started to deteriorate more quickly.``
Researchers are not sure why explanatory style should affect health. One possible answer is suggested by studies at the University of Colorado and Yale University, which found that the attitude of helplessness typical of pessimists is associated with weakening of the immune system`s resistance to tumors and infection. Or pessimists may neglect themselves.
Peterson, at the University of Michigan, for example, has found that people whose explanatory style is pessimistic smoke and drink more and exercise less than optimists do. On a checklist of health habits, they were much more careless of their health than the optimists were. And the pessimists reported twice as many colds and doctors` visits during the year as the optimists did.
Several researchers, including Seligman, have tied explanatory style to depression in the face of failure.
``If you see a failure as due to something you can change, then it is not so devastating,`` said Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Rice University, who has studied people`s explanatory style in depression, loneliness and shyness. People are most vulnerable to these problems, he said, if they believe that they can do little or nothing to change the causes of failure.
In a study of insurance agents reported in a recent issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, for example, Seligman found that how the agents explained their failures to make a sale made the difference between their becoming outstanding salesmen on the one hand or quitting the company on the other.