Приобретённый оптимизм: развитие позитивного мышления и его влияние на жизнь

Concept in positive psychology

Learned optimism is the idea in positive psychology that a talent for joy, like any other, can be cultivated. In contrast with learned helplessness, optimism is learned by consciously challenging any negative self talk.

Seligman came to the concept of learned optimism through a scientific study of learned helplessness, the idea that a certain reoccurring negative event is out of the person's control. As he was performing tests to study helplessness further, he began to wonder why some people resisted helplessness conditioning. He noticed that, while some subjects blamed themselves for negative outcomes, others blamed the experiment for setting them up to fail. Seligman shifted his focus to attempting to discover what it is that keeps some people from ever becoming helpless. The answer was optimism. Using his knowledge about conditioning people to be helpless in the lab, he shifted his focus to conditioning people to be optimists. The result of these experiments led to defining the processes of learning optimism.

In a study completed by Martin Seligman and Gregory Buchanan at the University of Pennsylvania and published by the American Psychological Association, learned optimism techniques were found to significantly reduce depression in a class of college freshmen. As incoming students to the university, a survey determined the most pessimistic students and they were invited to participate in the study. They were randomly assigned, half to attend a 16 hour workshop on the techniques of learning optimism, and half were the control group. In an 18 month follow up, 32% of the control group suffered moderate to severe depression and 15% suffered moderate to severe anxiety disorder, whereas only 22% of the workshop participants were depressed and 7% had anxiety issues. Those who participated in the learned optimism workshop also reported fewer health problems over the 18 month period of the study than those students in the control group. A study done by Peter Schulman at the Wharton School, published in the Journal of Selling and Sales Management, looked to determine the effects of applying learned optimism in business. After measuring the optimism levels of an insurance sales force, it was determined that the optimistic sales people sold 35 percent more, and identified pessimists were two times more likely to quit in the first year than optimists. As a result of his studies, he recommends testing sales job candidates for optimism levels to fit them to appropriate positions, training employees in learned optimism techniques, and designing an organization overall to have attainable goals set and good support from management. Finally, a study conducted by Mark Ylvisaker of the College of Saint Rose and Timothy Feeney of the Wildwood Institute looked at children with executive function impairment. The children had brain functioning impairments affecting motor skills, memory, or the ability to focus. Learned optimism was not taught to the children themselves, but rather to their caretakers, who often are more likely to feel helpless than optimistic in regards to caring for the child. It was found that learned optimism in caretakers of children with brain damage actually led the children to develop more functioning than children without optimistic caretakers. Thus Ylvisaker concludes that the optimism of professional rehabilitators can affect the results of their clients.

If learnable, optimism techniques could be practical in life. They are used today in many areas such as parenting, business, therapy, and education. Business would benefit from more optimistic workers, as they are more successful Seligman's focus in business is on "the personal wall" that is each individual worker's set point of discouragement. Putting the ABCDE model into practice attempts to allow workers to respond to this "wall" with a readiness to conquer rather than to feel dejected. The Attributional Style Questionnaire is often used to measure optimism of job candidates during the interview process by asking the participant to write down causes for situational failures. Participants attributions may be used to help understand if the candidate will be a high or low performer in his/her projected role based on his level of optimism. Learned optimism has been used to combat depression during cognitive behavioral therapy. This is based on the idea that patients may be depressed in part because they have a pessimistic outlook Rather than perceiving adversity as a constant thing that cannot be overcome, and taking personal blame for that adversity, patients come out of cognitive behavioral therapy with the belief that they can control how they respond to adversity. A shift toward optimism is a shift away from depression.