Optimism and Health

MARGARET KEMENY: One of the most important areas right now is really looking at positive emotions, positive psychological states, and their potential for having health benefits. And there is some compelling evidence out there to support the notion. It's still much less investigated and much less well understood than the impact of negative states of mind, depression, for example, which is studied quite a bit. But I think it really, really is warranted.

And for example, optimism. We've done work and others have done work that suggests that optimism, having an optimistic framework, attitude, can predict health benefits. In our research, it's optimism about your health. It's not optimism broadly. We tend not to find that just having an optimistic outlook overall predicts health outcomes.

But people who have positive expectations about their health, in the future, feel that they're going to be able to do well in the future, that that particular kind of outlook predicts better health over follow-up periods that we've used. So it might be that you have to really look at optimism in a very specific way—I don't know.