Positive, negative life-event expectations and psychological profiles

Positive thinking is associated with better mental health and more promising recovery from illness.. The objective of the current research was to test the hypotheses that individuals with predominantly positive life-event expectations exhibit superior psychological profile when compared to people with a primarily negative outlook on life events. A sample of volunteers (n=253) comprised mainly of women (79.5%) evaluated five life-scenarios having either positive or negative outcome and completed questionnaires assessing wellbeing, optimism, pessimism, satisfaction with life and emotional intelligence. Based on the number of positive/negative responses, participants were grouped into positive and negative life-event expectancy groups. The groups were compared on the psychological measures using multivariate statistical tests.People with positive expectations reported statistically significantly greater well-being, optimism, and emotional intelligence, and lesser pessimism than those with primarily negative expectations. When the tests were repeated with a sub-sample having only 1/5 positive or negative responses, the results emerged to be even stronger. While optimism was positively correlated with positive expectations, the shared variance was only 13.4%. Positive expectation is related, but it is not identical to optimism. The more positive life-event expectations are associated with superior psychosocial profiles compared to the predominantly negative expectations.