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. Ī 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. 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. 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. They were randomly assigned, half to attend a 16-hour workshop on the techniques of learning optimism, and half were the control group. As incoming students to the university, a survey determined the most pessimistic students and they were invited to participate in the study. 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. The result of these experiments led to defining the processes of learning optimism. Using his knowledge about conditioning people to be helpless in the lab, he shifted his focus to conditioning people to be optimists. Seligman shifted his focus to attempting to discover what it is that keeps some people from ever becoming helpless. He noticed that, while some subjects blamed themselves for negative outcomes, others blamed the experiment for setting them up to fail. As he was performing tests to study helplessness further, he began to wonder why some people resisted helplessness-conditioning. 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. Optimists also quickly internalize positive events while pessimists externalize them. Optimists are therefore generally more confident. Personalization: Optimists blame bad events on causes outside of themselves, whereas pessimists blame themselves for events that occur.Optimistic people also allow good events to brighten every area of their lives rather than just the particular area in which the event occurred. Pervasiveness: Optimistic people compartmentalize helplessness, whereas pessimistic people assume that failure in one area of life means failure in life as a whole.Optimists point to specific temporary causes for negative events pessimists point to permanent causes. They also believe good things happen for reasons that are permanent, rather than seeing the transient nature of positive events. Permanence: Optimistic people believe bad events to be more temporary than permanent and bounce back quickly from failure, whereas others may take longer periods to recover or may never recover.Other differences exist between pessimists and optimists in terms of explanatory style: The optimist's outlook on failure can thus be summarized as "What happened was an unlucky situation (not personal), and really just a setback (not permanent) for this one, of many, goals (not pervasive)". The resulting optimism-one that grew from pessimism-is a learned optimism. Seligman invites pessimists to learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way. Pessimism, on the other hand, is much more common pessimists are more likely to give up in the face of adversity or to suffer from depression. The benefits of an optimistic outlook are many: Optimists are higher achievers and have better overall health. Learned optimism was defined by Martin Seligman and published in his 1990 book, Learned Optimism. In contrast with learned helplessness, optimism is learned by consciously challenging any negative self talk. Learned optimism is the idea in positive psychology that a talent for joy, like any other, can be cultivated. JSTOR ( March 2012) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
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