The review is not intended to be exhaustive. The terms physical well-being and physical health will be used interchangeably throughout. The studies reviewed (with one exception) go beyond reports of physical symptom or self-rated health. The review focuses primarily on studies with “harder” physical health endpoints: studies with objective outcomes such as clinically identifiable disease, biomarkers related to disease, and mortality. This article provides a sampling of the research that has been done over more than three decades relating optimism to physical well-being. Put simply, we found ourselves interested in generalized dispositional optimism, a stable attribute of personality. We became aware that we were interested in an optimism that people brought to diverse contexts, rather than being situation-specific. Thinking about optimism and pessimism as broad in scope moved us down another road as well. The optimism and pessimism we became interested in was the kind that was very broad in scope: an optimism and pessimism that had implications for perhaps all of life circumstances. Confidence and doubt can pertain to very narrow contexts (e.g., the ability to place a call to 911 about an accident you see), to contexts a bit broader (e.g., the ability to administer first aid to someone in need), to very broad contexts (e.g., the ability to live the life of a helpful person). The expectancy construct has a broad range of applicability. This principle embedded our work into a large family of expectancy-value theories of motivation (e.g., Atkinson, 1964 Bandura, 2006 Feather, 1982). One of the principles we found important in that work was the role of expectancies in goal-directed action: specifically, the idea that people will work toward outcomes they think they can attain, but not toward those they think they cannot attain. In the 1980s, we were deeply involved in research on processes involved in behavioral self-regulation ( Carver & Scheier, 1981). The construct has since assumed a level of scientific rigor that its common-sense origin lacked, a rigor due largely to the many researchers that have joined forces to understand it more fully. We became interested in it via the route of theory, and via an evolving, discipline-wide movement called health psychology.
This article is about a construct that has been part of lay psychology for a very long time, but is also grounded in psychological theory. Among their sources were lay observations of ways in which people behave in various contexts, and theoretical formulations that generally took the form of whatever was the meta-theory of the time. These questions include the relationship of optimism and pessimism to each other (and the implications of that relationship for physical well-being), the origins of optimism and pessimism, and interventions that might be implemented to reduce the negative impact of a pessimistic outlook.Īs psychology emerged as a discipline over the past century, a wide range of constructs were introduced. The paper concludes with a brief look to the future, describing several issues and questions that still need to be answered. Also considered are potential pathways-behavioral, biological, and social-that might explain these associations. Included in the review are initial studies suggesting that optimism and physical well-being might be linked, as well as more recent, larger scale epidemiological studies that make the point more emphatically. A review of the research linking optimism and physical health is then presented. Assessment of optimism is described, along with data regarding its stability. This article provides a representative review of 30 years of research on dispositional optimism and physical well-being. Dispositional optimism is the generalized, relatively stable tendency to expect good outcomes across important life domains.
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