Search results for "Pessimism"

2017

Background/Objective: The Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) is often used to assess dispositional optimism. The aims of this study were to test psychometric properties of the LOT-R, to provide normative scores, and to test the association between optimism and several psychological, sociodemographic, and behavioral factors. Method: A randomly selected German general population community sample with an age range of 18-80 years (N = 9,711) was surveyed. Results: The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) proved two (correlated) factors: Optimism and Pessimism. Invariance tests across gender and age groups confirmed metric invariance. There were only small gender differences in the LOT-R total …

Unrealistic Optimism in the Time of Coronavirus Pandemic: May It Help to Kill, If So—Whom: Disease or the Person?

2020

Objective: The results of numerous empirical studies have showed the occurrence of so-called unrealistic optimism. Thus, we aimed to investigate whether in the situation of an imminent coronavirus pandemic, people would still perceive themselves as being less exposed to the disease than others. Methods: Survey studies were conducted to examine the level of unrealistic optimism. Participants (n = 171, 67.3% of women) in a subjective way judged the risk of their coronavirus infection and the likelihood that this would happen to an average student of the same sex from their class. The survey was conducted in three waves: prior to the announcement of the first case of coronavirus (2&ndash

Psychometric evaluations of the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R), based on nine samples

2021

The aim of this study was to examine psychometric properties of the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R).The LOT-R was administered in five clinical samples, three samples of the adult general population, and one sample of adolescents. Seven of the studies were performed in Germany and two in Colombia. All of the sample sizes were above 300.Cronbach's alpha coefficients were between .57 and .75 for the eight adult samples, the correlations between the scales optimism and pessimism ranged from -.05 to -.37, and the coefficients of temporal stability (test-retest correlations) of the scales ranged from .43 to .69. There were no systematic age and gender effects observed in the nine studies. …

Effects of (un)employment on young couples’ health and life satisfaction

2012

This study investigated effects of employed and unemployed job status on health outcomes with questionnaires in 50 young couples. Analysis of variance revealed higher pessimism, higher stress levels, and lower life satisfaction in couples in which one partner was unemployed. These couples also exhibited more health risk behaviours compared to couples in which both partners were working. The dyadic analysis of data, using an actor-partner interdependence model, demonstrated strong actor and partner effects for male partner's job status. Being unemployed was significantly associated not only with male partner's life satisfaction but also with the life satisfaction of his female partner. In ad…

Predicting presenteeism via effort-reward imbalance and dispositional optimism: Is it the interaction that matters? Results from The Saxony Longitudi…

2019

BACKGROUND The importance of experienced work stress and individual traits as well as their interplay is analyzed with regard to dysfunctional coping behavior in case of sickness. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to examine the predictive capability of effort-reward imbalance (ERI) including overcommitment, meaning the intrinsic propensity in terms of excessive work-related expenditure (OC), in consideration of dispositional optimism/pessimism on presenteeism. METHODS A total of 353 men and women aged 38 from the 25th panel wave of The Saxony Longitudinal Study in 2011 were included in the analysis. Effort-reward imbalance (ERI) including overcommitment was assessed with the Effort-Rewar…

Research on Unrealistic Optimism among HoReCa Workers as a Possible Future Hotspot of Infections

2021

As we are facing a new surge of the highly infectious delta variant of COVID-19, there is an urgent need for research to reduce the harm before this next wave hits. In the present paper, we present data that is alarming. We have found that HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, and catering services) workers, who are highly exposed to many new social interactions in close contact, present an unrealistic optimism (UO) bias: they perceive themselves as less at risk to this virus in comparison to others. From the literature, we already know that individuals holding this view are less involved in preventive actions and present more risky behaviors. In the face of the delta variant, this leads to the conc…

Supporters’ attitudes towards European football governance: structural dimensions and sociodemographic patterns

2020

The role of fans in football governance is a topic of increasing academic and political interest. This article offers a quantitative approach to investigate supporters’ opinions of governance structures in European football. It asks whether fans trust governing bodies, clubs, leagues and other stakeholders currently in charge of football governance. It also investigates the extent to which fans consider they should have a direct say on how football clubs are governed. Drawing on concepts from sports governance literature, an online survey collects opinions of football fans in six European countries (United Kingdom, Spain, Turkey, Poland, France, and Germany). The results indicate a high lev…

Household optimism and overborrowing

2018

We use Finnish household-level data from 1994 to 2013 to measure how often and what kind of forecast errors households make and how the errors are linked to the households' borrowing behavior and overindebtedness. We find that those households that make the largest optimistic forecast errors have greater debt-to-income ratios. They also are more likely to report that they suffer from excessive debt loads and have problems in coping with their bills. There are no such systematic effects for the households that make pessimistic forecast errors. peerReviewed

Disentangling the effects of optimism and attributions on feelings of success

2014

Two experiments examined the effects of dispositional optimism and attributions on feelings of success in a performance setting. In Experiment 1, participants successfully solved three cognitive tasks and attributed the success either internally (i.e., to themselves) or externally (i.e., to a teammate). We found no effect of optimism, but a significant effect of the attribution: Internal attribution predicted an increase in feelings of success. In Experiment 2, we replicated the design and adopted an extreme groups approach in order to include the extremes of the optimism dimension. Only optimism affected feelings of success in this sample: Pessimistic participants showed higher increases i…

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

2015

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…