Can you train yourself to be an optimist?

Catherine de Lange, contributor

Cognitive psychologist Elaine Fox from the University of Essex, UK, explores the ways in which we can retrain our brains to view the world with a positive outlook in her book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain. New Scientist asked her why some people see the glass as half empty, and what techniques science offers us to change that perspective.

What makes someone more prone to optimism or a pessimism?
At the very core of who we are are cognitive biases, ways of processing the information in the world around us that are automatically going on outside of our awareness. So some people are tuning in to negative information at a very subtle level and other people are tuning into positive information.

Do we do this all the time?
Yes. If you walk into a room and people laugh and then say "Hello", somebody who is socially anxious will think that people are laughing at them, and will make some negative interpretation. Someone else might think, ?They?re pleased to see me?. So the same information can be interpreted in quite different ways. That?s something quite fundamental and it leads to the longer term states of your mindset.

So these biases predispose us to having a particular outlook - but where do they come from in the first place?
We know that we aren?t born into the world as blank slates - we already have some tendencies, and fear and pleasure are great motivators. When we come into the world our brain automatically tunes into things that might harm us or benefit us, and there are individual differences to how people respond. We know that there are different genes and chemical systems involved in pleasure and fear responses.

Are we born destined to become either optimists or pessimists?
No, quite the opposite. Genes are involved in that, but it?s how genes and the environment come together that determines these brain states. One thing that?s come out of the research is that these brain circuits that underlie our mindsets are highly malleable. There are even techniques that can shift these brain circuits. So I wouldn?t say we are born to be optimistic or pessimistic and never change -I think we are born with certain tendencies to react in certain ways. For instance, some people go through all sorts of things and just seem to bounce back. So these fundamental differences do seem to lead to fundamental differences in resilience.

What kind of evidence is there for this idea?
One bias we can study in the lab is attention bias. We use a computer and flash up a pair of images, for example a snake and a rabbit - one is a threat and one is not. After the images flash up - just for 20 milliseconds so people aren?t consciously aware of what the pictures are - they have to press a button when they see a target on the screen. After about 1000 of these trials, you find slight differences in reaction speed. Negative people tend to report the target faster if it comes up on the same side as the negative image, suggesting they paid more attention to it. At the end of the session we present them with a test, and the research finds that people who have a negative bias tend to show a stronger stress response than people who have a positive bias.

What?s so good about being optimistic anyway?
The research shows that, as long as they are realists too, people who have an optimistic mindset and feel like they are able to cope when things do go wrong benefit in all sorts of ways. The evidence is also quite strong now that an optimistic mindset is beneficial for our health. People with optimistic mindsets are also more successful in business, and seem to live longer.

Could it not be that people who are successful and healthy are more optimistic? Presumably there are lots of people who failed in business even though they were optimistic but aren?t around to tell the tale?
Lab based research does show that optimistic people are more persistent. In one study, people were rated on their level of pessimism or optimism and then were given anagrams to do, some of which were impossible. People who were optimistic stayed significantly longer trying to do the impossible anagrams - so they didn?t give up - that?s good experimental evidence.

So is a pessimist like me just doomed to failure?
No. One of the things I?ve been researching are cognitive bias modification procedures - experimental techniques where we use computers to induce different biases in people in the lab. You can take somebody with a neutral bias and then induce either a positive or negative bias temporarily, and we can see that that actually changes people?s emotional vulnerability. That demonstrates that these biases are playing a causal role in both vulnerability and in resilience. And training people to zone in on the positive or negative images over time can shift these biases.

So you can train your brain to be more optimistic?
Yes - and that?s the kind of research we?re doing now. We need to get a lot more information but one of the nice things about these techniques is that they can be implemented over the internet or even on smart phones. There was a big study in Harvard recently where people used smart phones for a few minutes a day to train these biases. The early research is very encouraging in suggesting that these techniques shift people's mindsets in a fundamental way that should lead to positive changes.

Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain: How to retrain your brain to overcome pessimism and achieve a more positive outlook by Elaine Fox
Basic Books
?18.99/$26.99

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