Even Optimists Get the Blues: Interindividual Consistency in the Tendency to Brace for the Worst

The Causes and Consequences of Drifting Expectations

Awaiting news of uncertain outcomes is distressing because the news might be disappointing. To prevent such disappointments, people often "brace for the worst," pessimistically lowering expectations before news arrives to decrease the possibility of surprising disappointment (a negative prediction error, or PE). Computational decision-making research commonly assumes that expectations do not drift within trials, yet it is unclear whether expectations pessimistically drift in real-world, high-stakes settings, what factors influence expectation drift, and whether it effectively buffers emotional responses to goal-relevant outcomes. Moreover, individuals learn from PEs to accurately anticipate future outcomes, but it is unknown whether expectation drift also impedes PE-based learning. In a sample of students awaiting exam grades (N = 625), we found that expectations often drift and tend to drift pessimistically. We demonstrate that bracing is preferentially modulated by uncertainty; it transiently buffers the initial emotional impact of negative PEs but impairs PE-based learning, counterintuitively sustaining uncertainty into the future.

International optimism: Correlates and consequences of dispositional optimism across 61 countries

OBJECTIVE

The current exploratory study sought to examine dispositional optimism, or the general expectation for positive outcomes, around the world.

METHOD

Dispositional optimism and possible correlates were assessed across 61 countries (N = 15,185; mean age = 21.92; 77% female). Mean-level differences in optimism were computed along with their relationships with individual and country-level variables.

RESULTS

Worldwide, mean optimism levels were above the midpoint of the scale. Perhaps surprisingly, country-level optimism was negatively related to gross domestic product per capita, population density, and democratic norms and positively related to income inequality and perceived corruption. However, country-level optimism was positively related to projected economic improvement. Individual-level optimism was positively related to individual well-being within every country, although this relationship was less strong in countries with challenging economic and social circumstances.

CONCLUSIONS

While individuals around the world are generally optimistic, societal characteristics appear to affect the degree to which their optimism is associated with psychological well-being, sometimes in seemingly anomalous ways.

On the Experience of Awaiting Uncertain News

At some point in life, everyone must wait for important news—whether the news from college applications, job interviews, medical tests, academic exams, or even romantic overtures. Until recently, the psychological literature on stress and coping had largely overlooked these common and often distressing experiences. However, the past 5 years have seen significant advances in the understanding of waiting experiences, revealing insights into the nature, time course, and consequences of distress during waiting periods; individual differences in these experiences; and effective and ineffective strategies for coping with this type of uncertainty. This article reviews the emerging findings from this growing literature and provides suggestions for future research in this area.

Is There a Downside to Anticipating the Upside? Children's and Adults' Reasoning About How Prior Expectations Shape Future Emotions

Four- to 10-year-olds and adults (N = 205) responded to vignettes involving three individuals with different expectations (high, low, and no) for a future event. Participants judged characters' pre-outcome emotions, as well as predicted and explained their feelings following three events (positive, attenuated, and negative). Although adults rated high-expectation characters more negatively than low-expectation characters after all outcomes, children shared this intuition starting at 6-7 years for negative outcomes, 8-10 years for attenuated, and never for positive. Comparison to baseline (no expectation) indicated that understanding the costs of high expectations emerges first and remains more robust across age than recognition that low expectations carry benefits. Explanation analyses further clarified this developing awareness about the relation between thoughts and emotions over time.