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Cognition and stress
Published in Tony Cassidy, Stress, Cognition and Health, 2023
Expectancies or beliefs about the future, are powerful predictors of action and psychological well-being (Bandura, 1977). Two well established sets of expectancies are self-efficacy and optimism. A third independent set of expectancies about the future are encompassed by hope (Snyder, 2000; Snyder et al., 1991). Snyder defines hope as a composite of agency and pathways in that the individual with hope has the capacity to implement goals for themselves and are competent in working out how to achieve the goals (Ciarrochi et al., 2015). Hope has links to psychological flexibility (Bonanno et al., 2004; Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010). People with high levels of hope flexibly adjust implementation strategies and goal-related efforts when thwarted (Snyder et al., 1996; Snyder, 2000). Hope can be distinguished from related variables such as optimism and positive explanatory style. Both hope and optimism are focused on the future. At the individual level, the best current explanation of mediators of the stress process is couched in terms of outcome expectancies (Gallagher, Long & Phillips, 2019). These outcome expectancies are a tripartite of hope, optimism and self-efficacy, which arguable contribute to resilience, which we will discuss further in the next chapter on positive psychology and stress.
Around pain
Published in Stephen Buetow, Rethinking Pain in Person-Centred Health Care, 2020
A lesson from Samuel Beckett’s67 play Waiting for Godot is that purpose comes from waiting. Likewise there is meaning in ambiguity that waits with hope and optimism, embracing the wild, seductive uncertainty of the unfamiliar. Although optimism may connote notions of naïveté and disavowal, an optimistic accounting of events in life has been positively associated with problem management.68 This explanatory style enables
Optimism and happiness
Published in Silvia Bonino, Coping with Chronic Illness, 2020
It is the opinion shared by psychologists that at the base of unhappiness there are not the misfortunes that occurred to a person as much as it is their mental attitude toward those events. In particular, depression is based on the belief that there is no possibility of control and regulation over one’s life and actions, accompanied by an explanatory egocentric and negative style. The sense of failure to control, so frequent with disease, can go as far as an experience of total impotence, which has been defined as “learned impotence”; the latter leads to “giving up” believing that all action is devoid of meaning, importance and usefulness. The explanatory style concerns the way of interpreting events; with depression it is self-centered and pessimistic, and systematically reports negative events to itself and to its own incapacity, by not giving value nor positive merit when and where it is due. Many people make the initial mistake of not discriminating in which areas they can exercise their action and needlessly worry about issues over which they have no control. In this way they only increase the sense of helplessness and reinforce the tendency to report one’s failures to oneself; the inclination to mull over aggravates these attitudes, in a crescendo of pessimistic evaluations, erroneous interpretations, inaction and bad adaptations.
Overcoming Performance Slumps: Psychological Resilience in Expert Cricket Batsmen
Published in Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 2020
Christopher J. Brown, Joanne Butt, Mustafa Sarkar
More recently, research has found that the occurrence of slumps is associated with causal attributions for performance. Specifically, Ball (2013) conducted a study with elite athletes competing at national and international level in a variety of individual and team sports and found that athletes with a pessimistic explanatory style experienced more frequent performance slumps. Ball suggested internal and stable attributions for poor performance fostered negative emotional states, reduced motivation, and decreased confidence that further inhibited future performance. Thus, athletes with a pessimistic explanatory style can experience a downward spiral of performances that further reinforces their internal and stable attributions. This is consistent with attribution theory (see Weiner, 2010), which posits that individuals with a pessimistic explanatory style typically explain their poor performance with stable causes, such as a lack of ability. Furthermore, individuals with a pessimistic explanatory style anticipate that negative outcomes will be persistent and enduring, often leading to a reduction in expectations of success.
Preliminary Psychometrics and Potential Big Data Uses of the U.S. Army Family Global Assessment Tool
Published in Military Behavioral Health, 2020
Kathrine S. Sullivan, Stacy A. Hawkins, Tamika D. Gilreath, Carl A. Castro
The Soldier and Family Global Assessment Tools are grounded in positive psychology, which seeks to identify and promote characteristics that enable individuals and communities to thrive (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). As such, these instruments assess positive emotions, personal attributes, and resilient functioning, which contribute to a “full life” (Peterson, Park, & Seligman, 2005). On the Family GAT, these positive attributes include character strengths, optimism, positive coping, and healthy family and relationship functioning. Additionally, several scales measure aspects of negative explanatory style, which has its roots in learned helplessness theory (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). On the Family GAT, these include attributes such as depression, catastrophic thinking, and loneliness.
Posttraumatic growth experiences and its contextual factors in women with breast cancer: An integrative review
Published in Health Care for Women International, 2019
Jianxia Zhai, Jennifer Newton, Beverley Copnell
The relations between cognitive process and PTG have been assessed in four studies. Chan, Ho, Tedeschi, and Leung (2011) identified that positive attentional bias (selective attention to positive information) and positive cancer-related rumination (actively thinking about breast cancer) were positively related to PTG. Ho, Chan, Yau, and Yeung (2011) identified that global dimension of explanatory style (the manner in which people cognitively process and find an attribution of the event that has happened) for positive events, significantly predict self-perceived PTG. Soo and Sherman (2015) found that intrusion and instrumental rumination (active processing of content, both to understand the change in circumstances following diagnosis and the initiation of adaptive behaviors to reduce the disparity between “unwell” and “healthy” self) as subcomponents of rumination were positively related to PTG. Lelorain, Tessier, Florin, and Bonnaud-Antignac (2012) suggested that cognitive process along with personal and social-environmental factors are likely to influence the emergence of PTG in women with breast cancer.