So we're going to now kind of slow down and do a little bit of a deeper dive into optimism. Optimism to me is one of the most fascinating variables that contributes to resilience. It's so important in terms of your well being, your physical health, your emotional health, we're going to talk all about that. I think part of the reason that I am so fascinated by optimism is because I am a recovering pessimist. I'm one of these people, kind of came into the world a little crankier than the next guy. And so I've come to really appreciate the importance of optimism, and that optimism is something that we can all learn. I can learn how to think more optimistically. And that's what we're going to be talking with you about as well. All right, so as we get into the research on optimism, which we'll do in a few minutes, I first want to say a little bit about, how is optimism assessed? There are two basic ways that optimism is assessed in the research literature. And I want to just talk to you about both of them for a few minutes. So one is to assess what I would describe as dispositional optimism, the basic belief or expectation that good things are going to happen. The world is good, people are basically good, that sort of forward-thinking belief. And the LOT-R, Life Orientation Test-Revised, developed by researchers Drs Carver and Scheier, assesses dispositional optimism. An example of an item is, in uncertain times, I expect the best. And if you endorse that, that's an indicator of optimism. Another item is, I rarely count on good things happening to me. If you endorse that, that's more of an indicator of a more pessimistic or less optimism. So the LOT-R is one of the primary ways that researchers assess optimism, dispositional optimism. Now, there's a whole other way of assessing optimism called explanatory style. And this line of research is led by Dr. Marty Seligman, my mentor. And he helped us to understand that another way to think about optimism is to take a close look at how we explain the causes of the good and the bad things that happen to us. He called it explanatory style because it's our style of explaining the good and the bad things that happen in our lives. And what he's found is that most of us have a habitual, reflexive way of explaining to ourselves why these good things happened and why these bad things happened. So let's take a closer look at explanatory style theory. So what Seligman and colleagues have found is that when something bad or good, I'm going to focus on bad right now, happens to us, our brains automatically generate answers to the question why. What caused that? And that we can assess our answers to the question why, our explanations, along three dimensions. The first dimension is internal versus external. So some of us, when something bad happens, our brains focus on an internal explanation for why that bad thing happened. We believe that we are the cause of that bad event, internal. Other people, when something bad happens, believe that external factors are the cause of that bad event, other people or circumstances. And so one dimension of explanatory style is internal versus external. Do you believe that the causes of the problems you confront are due to you, you're the root cause? Or do you believe that it's external factors that led to the bad outcomes? Internal versus external, and you could be anywhere along that continuum or spectrum. The second dimension is stable versus unstable. So when something bad happens, does your brain tend to focus on the stable causes of the problem? The things that are unchangeable, that are permanent, that you can't do anything about? Or does your brain tend to focus on the unstable causes of the problem? The things that are fleeting and temporary, and that you can exert some control over? So the second dimension is stable versus unstable, and again, you could be anywhere along that continuum. All right, the third dimension is global versus specific. So when something bad happens in your life, does your brain focus on the causes of the problem that are going to lead to lots of other problems, too? That it's going to bleed into lots of other areas of your life? Or do you explain the causes of your setbacks as very specific causes? Yeah, it led to that negative outcome, but it's not going to lead to negative outcomes in every aspect of my life. So global versus specific, and you could be anywhere along that continuum. So the three dimensions of explanatory style are, when bad things happen, do you believe that the cause of that bad thing was internal, about you, or external, other people or circumstances? Do you believe it was stable, something that's unchangeable? Or do you believe it's unstable, something that you can influence, something that can change? And do you believe that whatever caused the problem is global, and it's going to negatively impact every area of your life? Or do you believe that whatever caused the problem is specific, and it's just going to have that negative outcome? And what Seligman says is that another way to think of optimism is, optimism is the tendency to, when bad things happen, to explain bad events as external, it's not all your fault. Unstable, that whatever caused that bad event is changeable, you could do something about it. And specific, that whatever caused that bad event is local. It's not going to negatively impact all areas of your life. So optimism is external, unstable, and specific ways of explaining setbacks, whereas pessimism is the opposite. Pessimists and pessimistic thinking is a tendency to believe that whatever caused the problem is internal, it's all about you, it's stable, it's completely unchangeable, and it's global. It's going to undermine every area of your life. And so this is a very different way of assessing optimism. The LOT-R looks at optimism for the future, your beliefs about the future. And explanatory style looks at your beliefs and your explanations of the past. We're going to draw on both of these lines in our work here. So in our work that we're going to talk about in this MOOC, we're going to focus both on the Carver and Scheier notion of optimism. That the belief that the future is positive, the expectation that good things are going to happen. As well as the way Dr. Seligman assesses optimism, the belief that failures and setbacks are caused by factors that are changeable and specific.
