Optimism/pessimism and associations with life event perceptions

Optimism is the generalized sense that good things will happen in the future, and people higher in optimism typically experience a host of positive personal and relational outcomes. However, when ostensibly important life events happen to optimists and pessimists, they rarely change their perspective about the future. One potential reason optimists are resilient to life circumstances is that they might vary in how they perceive those circumstances. Another source of confusion is whether these perceptions are driven by optimistic thinking per se or the lack of pessimistic thinking. In the current study, we examined how optimists and pessimists differ in their perceptions of life events in a large sample (N = 929) of college students answering questions about hypothetical life events. The pessimism scale largely drove perceptions that life events are unlikely to change someone's personality, such that the four findings from the composite scale were found for the pessimism subscale but only two were found for the optimism subscale. Nevertheless, pessimists tended to think that life events were unlikely to change their worldview, were more externally controlled, were less emotionally significant, and were more likely to negatively affect their social standing. Aside from these aggregate findings, optimism and pessimism were not systematically and consistently related to the perceptions of particular life events. These findings provide additional context for individual differences in life event perceptions and provide some future directions for why life events either do or do not motivate changes in optimism and pessimism.