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Positive Psychology
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
Seligman extended the concept of learned helplessness to explain some psychological problems in humans, including depression. Depressed people frequently have a sense of powerlessness and hopelessness and stay in unpleasant circumstances or bad interpersonal relationships rather than trying to escape or overcome their situation. Seligman proposed that this depressive behavior is a form of learned helplessness. Seligman (1998) eventually developed a program to teach “learned optimism” as a way of overcoming feelings of helplessness, habitual pessimism, and depression.
Stress vs. distress
Published in E. Scott Geller, Working Safe, 2017
When workers believe through personal experience their efforts can make a difference in safety, they develop an antidote for learned helplessness. This has been termed “learned optimism.” If the corporate climate empowers workers to take control and manage safety for themselves and their coworkers, they can legitimately attribute safety success to their own actions. This bolsters learned optimism and feelings of being in control. Besides seeing the glass as half full, optimistic people under stress find ways to fill the rest of the glass.
The association of personality traits with poststroke fatigue in daily life: An exploratory experience sampling method and cross-sectional study
Published in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 2023
Ela Lazeron-Savu, Bert Lenaert, Rudolf Ponds, Caroline van Heugten
Although speculative because these results do not allow causal inferences on the relation between optimism and fatigue, it would be interesting to investigate whether less optimistic individuals would benefit from certain add-on treatments. For instance, research suggests that dispositional optimism (Malouff & Schutte, 2017) and optimistic attributional styles (Seligman, 2011) can to a certain degree be learned. To the extent that a causal relationship between optimism and fatigue exists, learned optimism may also contribute to improvements in fatigue.
Five Essential Elements of Immediate and Mid–Term Mass Trauma Intervention: Empirical Evidence
Published in Psychiatry, 2021
Stevan E. Hobfoll, Patricia Watson, Carl C. Bell, Richard A. Bryant, Melissa J. Brymer, Matthew J. Friedman, Merle Friedman, Berthold P.R. Gersons, Joop de Jong, Christopher M. Layne, Shira Maguen, Yuval Neria, Ann E. Norwood, Robert S. Pynoos, Dori Reissman, Josef I. Ruzek, Arieh Y. Shalev, Zahava Solomon, Alan M. Steinberg, Robert J. Ursano
Hope can be facilitated by a broad range of interventions, from individual to group to mass media messaging. On an individual level, several studies have shown that those showing early signs of severe distress benefit from CBT that reduces individual’s exaggeration of personal responsibility, something that severely impedes hope due to the fear that one will continue to do badly because the problem is an internal, stable trait (Bryant et al., 1998; Foa et al., 1995). The Learned Optimism and Positive Psychology Model (Seligman et al., 2005) adopts the goals of identifying, amplifying, and concentrating on building strengths in people at risk. They distilled therapeutic components that can be applied to strength–building and prevention in which they concentrate on enhancing hope and disputing the catastrophic and exaggerated thinking that undermines hope. Trauma-focused treatment with adolescents has similarly shown the efficacy of addressing ongoing trauma-generated expectations, beyond symptom response, with forward looking exercises that promote developmental progression to instill hope and renewed motivation for learning and future planning (Saltzman et al., 2006). Additionally, the very act of individual intervention by a mental health professional communicates the message that, with treatment, things will get better (i.e., “I’m an expert and I believe that you can succeed”). Interventionists are encouraged to normalize people’s responses and to indicate that most people recover spontaneously (Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Resick et al., 2002), as this in itself instills hope against distressing thoughts (e.g., “I’m going crazy,” “I’m inadequate,” “My reaction is a sign that I can’t take it.”). Early intervention can also foster hope by using such techniques as guided self–dialogue (Foa & Rothbaum, 1998; Meichenbaum, 1974) to underscore and restructure irrational fears, manage extreme avoidance behavior, control self–defeating self-statements, and encourage positive coping behaviors.
Dispositional optimism and cognitive functioning following traumatic brain injury
Published in Brain Injury, 2019
Elsa Lee, Nimali Jayasinghe, Carly Swenson, Kristen Dams-O’Connor
There is growing recognition of the need to develop interventions to optimize recovery from TBI. Towards this end, clinician-researchers have highlighted the potential value of integrating the principles of positive psychology into treatment approaches (46). While optimism is considered a teachable skill (47), the evidence-base is too limited to be recommended as a specific remediation for patients with TBI. However, the findings of this study do provide a rationale for clinical research that examines whether interventions that target optimism promote cognitive recovery after TBI. Patients who sustain TBI must cope with a multitude of negative events, such as failure in performing cognitive tasks, difficulty in social interactions, or problems with work functioning. The theory of learned optimism (47) proposes that explanatory style for negative and positive events may guide future efforts. A pessimistic explanatory style in which negative events are attributed to personal, pervasive, and permanent causes while positive events are attributed to external, specific, and temporary causes supports neither positive expectations for the future not the initiation or maintenance of coping efforts. Studies indicate, however, that individuals with chronic conditions benefit from interventions that teach positive attribution that result in higher levels of life satisfaction and reduced anxiety (48). Furthermore, programs that promote optimism as part of a broader effort to build aspects of resiliency – such as self-awareness, regulating emotions, building social supports, and developing core values – have been found to improve clinical outcomes in patients with a range of conditions (49,50). Finally, negative affect is not synonymous with clinical depression, which is more widely recognized as a reversible factor in cognitive functioning in general (33) and among individuals with TBI (51). Although, all of the six items in this study’s measure of affect were relevant to depression, future studies might do well to examine and elucidate the associations between optimism with clinical depression as well as negative affect.