Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism in the face of failure: Evidence of a moderation by attribution

Abstract The present experiment set out to investigate the affective consequences of dispositional optimism and attribution in performance settings. Optimistic and pessimistic participants ( N  = 42 each) experienced failure at solving two cognitive tasks in an alleged team setting. The failure could either be attributed to themselves (internal condition) or a teammate (external condition). We found disordinal interactions of optimism and attribution on the feelings of success and feelings of failure. While the affective state of optimists deteriorated significantly if they attributed the failure internally compared to externally, pessimists were emotionally unaffected by the locus of attri…