An Enlightened-Realist Perspective on Positive Thinking

摘要

American culture emphasizes upbeat thinking, cheerfulness, optimism, and other manifestations of positive affect in its aphorisms, songs, religion, books, magazines, medicine, as well as business and psychology. This has led to the commonly unchallenged idea that positive thinking is always a good thing, which in turn has caused the power that negative thinking and affect hold, in terms of realistic appraisals of the self and the world, to be not only grossly underestimated but also frequently shunned. It is dangerous, however, to lose sight of unpleasant realities. In this paper we argue that an optimal range of affect is most adaptive and that extremes in either positive or negative affect are less beneficial. We present a model that links optimism to realism and discuss their combined influence, which results in the identification of five basic decision making approaches.