The Affective Mind

For there is nothing either good or bad,
but thinking makes it so.

–WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

IT WAS A cold, rainy day, and I was running late. I had forgotten just how busy the tube gets during the London rush hour. Hurrying down to the platform, jostling against damp people all rushing somewhere, I heard the announcement that the Central Line was momentarily suspended. A collective groan went up. Then came the news that the Central Line was entirely shut down because of a body under a train at Bond Street station. Everyone knew what that meant: another suicide on London’s ancient underground system. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who felt guilty about my irritation.

I later found out¹ that the man who threw himself under that train was Paul Castle, a wealthy property tycoon, polo player, and friend of Prince Charles. From humble beginnings, he had made and lost two fortunes and currently owned properties in some of London’s most exclusive areas, as well as a swish apartment in St. Moritz in Switzerland and a private plane to fly him there. What could have driven him to such drastic action? His friends couldn’t explain it. ‘It was out of character,’ one said. His friend Stephen Brook said that Paul had had recent health problems and the recession had affected his business. We can only speculate that a moment of pessimism and despair had convinced him that it was not worth going on.

Late the previous night, on the other side of town, a young woman jumped off Blackfriars Bridge into the dark, freezing Thames. Apparently also intent on suicide, she panicked when she found herself in a busy boat lane and started shouting. Within seconds, Adan Abobaker, hearing her distress, grabbed and threw a life preserver as far as he could into the dark water. ‘I realised it was nowhere² near her,’ he said later. Without hesitation, he stripped off his coat and sweater and jumped in. It took Adan more than two minutes to reach the young woman, but he managed to bring her back near shore away from the shipping lanes, where they were both rescued by the crew of a safety vessel who had seen what had happened. Both survived, following several hours of treatment for hypothermia at a nearby hospital.

Adan had recently fallen on hard times and was living in St. Mungo’s hostel for homeless people. ‘I just did what needed to be done,’ he said, making light of his bravery. ‘I just hope she’s got a family. Life is worth living; it’s not worth giving up.’ If only Paul Castle had thought that.

Some people have an unshakeable belief that things will work out. Others can only imagine a future without hope. Wealth seems to have little to do with it. Adan Abobaker had nothing and yet risked his life because ‘it’s not worth giving up.’ Paul Castle had wealth and success beyond what most people dream of, and yet he thought it was not worth going on.

Psychologists and neuroscientists have worked long and hard to devise ways to quantify such profoundly different takes on life. A first step is to ask what we mean by the terms optimism and pessimism. Loose vocabulary, while fine in everyday life, is not concise enough for a thorough, scientific analysis. To effectively quantify these mindsets, we need better definitions of the common words used to label them.

An important starting point is the distinction psychologists make between dispositions, or traits, and states, or momentary feelings. Think of some moments of happiness or despair you have experienced, such as when you won a prize or were offered an exciting job, or when somebody died. These experiences are states of happiness or sadness; they reflect the transient highs and lows of everyday life. A trait, on the other hand, is a more stable characteristic that endures across time. These are the emotional styles or ways of thinking that remain fairly steadfast across our lives. Mary has ‘Mary-like’ characteristics that remain fairly stable, just as Dave stays ‘Dave-like’ through thick and thin. Bubbly, happy babies tend to become adventurous, outgoing children who tend to become extroverted, sociable adults.

Scientific studies support this notion. In one study, the best predictor of happiness and optimism at the end of a nine-year period was happiness and optimism at the beginning of the study. In spite of major changes in life circumstances, optimists tended to stay optimistic, and pessimists tended to stay pessimistic.

The influence that our personalities³ have on our environmental experiences is illustrated in a study published in 1989 by Bruce Headey and Alexander Wearing of the University of Melbourne in Australia. They interviewed residents of the state of Victoria on several occasions over many years to see how life events and personality affected people’s happiness. They wanted to know the extent to which a person’s personality versus the things that happened to them affected well-being and happiness. Personality might account for, say, 40 per cent of happiness, whereas life events might account for 60 per cent. Alternatively, perhaps personality would turn out to be more important.

It didn’t take the researchers long to realise that they had made a fundamental mistake. As their study progressed, it was clear that the same kind of things kept happening to the same people over and over again. Lucky people were lucky again and again. Likewise, people with lots of bad experiences, like relationship breakups and job losses, seemed to encounter one bad thing after another. Their assumption that personality and life events would have separate influences on happiness was wrong. Instead, personality itself had the strongest influence on what happened to people. The optimists had more positive experiences, while the pessimists had more negative experiences.

Subsequent studies have confirmed that our personality, or our affective mindset, has a profound impact on the life events that we experience, and this does not tend to change too much over time. Picture a bubbly, outgoing child who is warm and friendly. People are much more likely to respond to this child with smiles and physical affection than they are to a withdrawn, unsmiling child. If he behaves consistently, the social world of the happy child will inevitably be more positive than that of the frightened child. There’s no luck involved: the emotional style of the child is playing a part in the kind of social world she inhabits. How we act in the world changes the kind of environment we experience and hence the range of opportunities and problems likely to come our way.

Optimism and pessimism, then, just like other features of our personality, can be thought of as traits or dispositions as well as states. Dispositional optimists are often upbeat and happy, with sunny dispositions that can infect those around them. Dispositional optimism is not just about being happy and upbeat, however; it’s more about having genuine hope for the future, a belief that things will work out, and an unshakeable faith that we can deal with whatever life throws at us. Optimists are not naïve – they don’t believe that nothing will ever go wrong – but they do have a deep-seated conviction that they can cope. Similarly, dispositional pessimism is not about being constantly sad and anxious but about being apprehensive about the future, aware of potential dangers, more alert to what might go wrong rather than what might go right. These are the people who err on the side of caution. Rather than take a risk, they will play it safe, although even the most pessimistic among us are likely to have times of great joy and happiness and hope for the future.

The scientific evidence that these fundamentally different mindsets come with costs and benefits is now overwhelming. One of the most important findings to emerge from the scientific literature, however, is that the real benefits of optimism only come when an optimistic mindset is linked with a healthy dose of realism. Blind optimism, and a belief that nothing will ever go wrong, is unlikely to be of any real benefit.

I discussed this with Michael J. Fox, the actor who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of twenty-nine and is, by his own admission, an irrepressible optimist. The escalating movement problems caused by Parkinson’s forced him to leave his highly successful movie and television career behind. Eighteen years after diagnosis, he was making a documentary with the unlikely title⁴ Michael J. Fox: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist. I was involved because Michael was interested in the scientific take on where optimism comes from and whether it can be measured in a reliable way.

Chatting after filming was complete, I saw that Michael fulfilled all the key characteristics of a dispositional optimist. An illness that would get most of us down had, it seemed, left him still upbeat, enjoying life. ‘Don’t think that I’m not aware of risk or what might go wrong,’ he told me. ‘I’m actually very good at assessing risk, but I know that I will be able to deal with whatever happens. Over the years, I have learned that I can deal with any difficulty. I don’t necessarily like it, but I generally feel I can deal with it.’

He explained that one of the most difficult things for him in the early days was the shift from people seeing him as ‘Michael J. Fox, the actor’ to ‘Michael J. Fox, the actor with Parkinson’s’ to finally ‘Michael J. Fox, the guy with Parkinson’s.’ ‘It really was tough,’ he said, but he had often wondered why he did not get depressed.

This was a real puzzle to him, as he wasn’t in any doubt from an early stage that Parkinson’s would end his flourishing acting career. Yet, apart from a couple of bouts of understandable frustration, he had always managed to stay hopeful about the future. It’s this type of resilience, an optimism that doesn’t put its head in the sand, that science has shown makes a real difference to our lives.

This type of optimism seems to occur naturally and is found in the most unlikely of places. When I was a teenager, I remember being profoundly shaken by the power of Italian author Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, recounting his experiences as a young chemist from Turin in a German concentration camp during the Second World War. In pared-down, unsentimental language, Levi chronicles the horrific story⁵ of a year at Auschwitz. The horrors of that year were to become the defining moment of his life. However, Levi never seemed to lose sight of the resilience of the human spirit, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. In many ways, his book rendered one of human history’s darkest hours into a force for good in the world.

Levi attributed his survival largely to his capacity to perceive his fellow inmates, as well as himself, as people and not as objects. Holding on to this perspective allowed him to avoid the demoralisation, or what he called the ‘spiritual shipwreck’, that engulfed so many others.

In a later book, Levi describes his long trek to freedom marching across eastern Europe and Russia, where the ‘vigorous people full of the love of life’ rekindled in him the joy of living that the camps had almost extinguished. Levi’s account gradually unfolds as a story of hope, echoing the experiences of many who have come through great adversity. Sometimes this optimism stems from a belief in a higher being – God – with the anticipation of a better life elsewhere; sometimes it comes from a deep-set belief in the innate goodness of humankind.

The original meaning of optimism⁶ is much closer to this notion than to the ‘rose-tinted glasses’ or ‘sunny-side-up’ ideas that we currently associate with optimism. The original sense comes from the Latin word optimum, meaning ‘the best possible,’ and the word was first coined by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz argued that God had created the best possible world and that this optimum world could not be improved upon. In other words, optimism had little to do with notions of ‘the bright side’ or the ‘glass half full’; instead, it referred to the idea that the world was already the best possible and couldn’t get any better.

Optimism, then, has a lot to do with accepting the world as it is – both good and bad have their place – and the trick is not to allow notions of evil and negativity to overwhelm us. Primo Levi and Michael J. Fox are realists who are fully aware that there will be problems and setbacks and that they need to be flexible and creative in finding solutions to their problems, but overall they have an unshakeable belief that things will work out in the end. And things invariably do, not because of random luck, but because optimists take control of their own destiny. These are the people who take steps to solve their problems.

The trait of pessimism is almost the polar opposite. The mind of the dispositional pessimist becomes infused with negativity, and every setback is taken as further evidence that the world is against them. Derived from the Latin word pessimus, the philosophical perspective of pessimism views this world as the worst of all possible worlds and assumes that everything ultimately gravitates towards evil. In psychological science, however, pessimism, just like optimism, is viewed more as a dispositional trait or an emotional style – our typical way of dealing with the world. Pessimists are convinced that their problems are beyond their control and will never go away. ‘Bad things just happen, and you can’t do anything about it; you just have no control over it,’ as one pessimist I interviewed told me. Believing that good things happen to other people is a hallmark of this mindset. Such feelings of powerlessness frequently lead to an enduring passivity and lack of motivation, which are other key components of pessimism and its darker cousin, depression.

Optimists, in contrast, feel that they have some control over what happens to them, tackling problems as temporary hitches rather than as ongoing difficulties. They have a natural tendency to accept the world as it is but believe that the way you deal with things determines who you are. If Primo Levi had taken the construction of the concentration camps personally, his experiences would have overwhelmed him. Instead, he managed to distance his thoughts by keeping in mind the humanity and decency of most of the people around him. Likewise, there was no descent into despair for Michael J. Fox when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Instead, he came out fighting and set up a foundation that is now raising millions of dollars each year for research into the disease.

Optimism and pessimism reverberate throughout our lives, leading to very different life experiences. Psychologists have come up with several ingenious ways to estimate the core characteristics of these mindsets. One option is to simply ask people, Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Psychology departments around the world are sinking under the weight of scales and questionnaires that probe and assess every attribute you can think of. Are you clever? Are you happy? Are you tough-minded? If it differs between people, there’s sure to be a questionnaire to measure it.

Several well-established scales are available that tell us how we rate compared to other people. One of the simplest and most reliable is called the Life Orientation Task (LOT), developed by Charles Carver at the University of Miami and Michael Scheier at Carnegie Mellon University.

A revised version called the LOT-R⁷ is presented below. Self-report measures like the LOT-R have been a mainstay of psychology for many years and are at the heart of telling us how we feel relative to others. Fill it out now to find out how optimistic or pessimistic you are. It’s important to fill out each question honestly; try not to let your answers to each question be influenced by those that came before. There are no correct or incorrect answers. The important thing is to answer each question according to how you really feel and not by what you think other people might say. Once you have completed the questionnaire, you can turn to the notes at the back of the book to see how to work out your score.