Abstract
For nearly a decade we’ve been studying the personality dimension of optimism vs pessimism (Scheier & Carver, 1985, 1992). Our contribution to the topic of this volume (the organization and functions of the self) is the argument that the personality disposition of optimism versus pessimism has an indelible impact on how the person—how the self—experiences reality. We believe the world is quite literally a different place for an optimist than it is for a pessimist, because of differences in the way these two kinds of people experience the world. These differences in experience depend, in turn, on differences in what these two kinds of people bring to the world.
Our interest in optimism evolved from an earlier interest in some of the issues that underlie the regulation of people’s moment-to-moment action (Carver & Scheier, 1981, 1990; Scheier & Carver, 1988). We begin this chapter by stepping back to those earlier interests and describing some of the themes that emerge from them, which will serve to set the stage for what will follow.
The work reported here was supported in part by NSF grants BNS 90-11653 and BNS 90-10425, by grant PBR-56 from the American Cancer Society, and by grant HL44436 from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. The chapter was written while the first author was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Carver, C.S., Scheier, M.F. (1995). The Role of Optimism Versus Pessimism in the Experience of the Self. In: Oosterwegel, A., Wicklund, R.A. (eds) The Self in European and North American Culture: Development and Processes. NATO ASI Series, vol 84. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0331-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0331-2_15
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