Optimism in Positive Psychology

Abstract

Optimism is one of the most important concepts in positive psychology. The benefits of being an optimist seem to outweigh the disadvantages by far. Most of the research supports this idea, and this is also how the general public thinks. By being an optimist, we expect good things to happen in the future, and we believe we can achieve our goals. On the contrary, if we are a pessimist, we tend to believe that things will not go our way. Consequently, we will have less motivation to act. In this article, we take a closer look at optimism in positive psychology, which is the kind of psychology that approaches the human psyche not from the aspect of psychopathology, but human thriving. Optimism is not as simple as it sometimes may sound. In this article, we examine its strong impact on well-being, life satisfaction, and even perceived pain management. But since optimism is not without any disadvantages, we also examined how some types of optimism, such as being too optimistic, can be not that good. Likewise, we talked about how some types of pessimism such as defensive pessimism can be beneficial in some cases. The most important point we find is that, the context is crucial when it comes to what kind of psychological attitude we should take, in terms of optimism or pessimism