The Glass Half Full by Suzanne C. Segerstrom

Author:Suzanne C. Segerstrom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781780337616
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-11-22T16:39:23+00:00

RUNNING ON EMPTY

Both of these papers had an explanation for why optimists were vulnerable: their positive future didn’t come true. The researchers thought that when optimistic people encountered difficult situations in which they couldn’t control stress or make it end within a short period of time, they basically fell apart and their immune systems suffered.

This explanation made no sense to me for two very basic reasons. First, optimistic people typically do very well psychologically under all kinds of stress. Second, some studies had actually looked at what happens to optimists when things go wrong, typically in the context of bad medical news. In one study, optimism was measured before couples underwent in vitro fertilization procedures. Now, usually by the time a couple undergoes infertility treatment, the partners are highly invested, both emotionally and financially, in conceiving a baby. However, the procedures are far from fail-safe, because only one out of three in vitro fertilization attempts succeeds and the odds are worse the older the prospective mum is (according to the American Pregnancy Association, less than 1 in 10 if she is over 40 years old)8. Most important for the question of optimism, it’s a basically uncontrollable procedure because little the prospective parents can do will affect their odds of conceiving. If optimists are likely to fall apart under uncontrollable stress, this is the place it should show up. What the study actually found was that optimistic people were more resilient when in vitro attempts failed. The pessimistic people—those who didn’t believe in a positive future to start with—were nonetheless the ones who were most depressed when that positive future failed to manifest.

If disappointment wasn’t the answer, I had to figure out why optimistic students close to their friends and family would have worse immunity. This effect goes against the whole idea that optimism and social resources provide double protection, because in this case they seemed to cancel each other out. The best clue came from my oldest data. Before I did my dissertation, I collected some questionnaires from law students about what they found most stressful about law school. Here is the Law School Top 7 Most Stressful Things list:

7. Difficulty of subject matter

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