The Glass Half-Full

"Yes. Segerstrom is one of the top psychologists working on optimism and pessimism. 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. I make a similar point in my own book. A lot of self-help books make the assumption that optimism and pessimism is all about the way we think. But Segerstrom makes the strong point that optimism is also about what you do. 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. Then we give the groups anagrams. In her case she would give them a variety of anagrams, including one which is impossible to solve. What she found was that optimistic people were more likely to spend time trying to solve it and not to give up. 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. There is a can-do attitude which is absolutely the optimistic mind-set, and which translates into their actions. She is looking at this at a behavioural level rather than through brain states. She has also done some work looking at immune system functioning, measuring the immune system in optimists and pessimist with some surprising results. Basically, 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. It turns out that in the short term the optimistic law students often had a compromised immune system. But she thinks it’s because in their first year they were busy giving life their all and trying a lot harder than the pessimist students. They went out more, made more friends, studied harder and went to more lectures. Because of this they were more prone to a compromised immune system. But by the second year this worked in their favour because, unlike the more pessimistic law students, they had a wider support network to help them and boost their feeling of wellbeing."