Alternative Health Blog

While optimism might seem in short supply in today's economy, there is good reason to look on the bright side for both health and happiness.

A team of researchers from the University of Oregon, Stanford, University of Texas and University of Arizona published a 2006 research paper that a man’s optimism or pessimism predicts the satisfaction level of a relationship between dating couples. The more optimistic the guy, the happier the couple. Specifically, the couples with an optimistic male partner reported that their arguments were more constructive than destructive. Those couples also perceived high levels of support from partners, a valuable commodity in anyone’s romantic world.

Optimism as a personal health commodity is hard to dispute. Some of strongest evidence comes from life expectancy studies. For example, a University of North Carolina study followed nearly 7,000 students over four subsequent decades who took personality tests in the mid-1960s. The researchers found people who were categorized as pessimists to be 42 percent more likely to die before roughly age 65 than those students who tested out as optimists. 

Two Dutch studies using dispositional optimism or future expectations as the guide found similar results: Optimists were 55 percent less likely to die from heart disease and optimists between 65 to 85 are 45 percent less likely to die over the following nine year than pessimists in the same age group.

On a larger scale that arguably affects every American’s capacity for optimism, it won’t surprise you to discover that University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center researchers have documented that optimistic candidates have won U.S. presidential races 80 percent of the time, including Barack Obama who was judged “clearly becoming more positive” than John McCain by the end of the third debate on Oct. 15. The only exception from 1900 through the 1980s? Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his three reelection bids and Richard Nixon.

At the practical level, University of Kentucky psychologist and researcher Suzanne Segerstrom published a study of 90 law school students that showed by mid-semester of the first year of law school, optimists had a greater number of helper T-cells than pessimistic students. T-cells are deemed to be the immune system’s primary protectors against viruses and even some cancers. The more positive students also tested higher for natural killer T-cells that help the body to fight off cancer cells.

 Segerstrom is one of the “positive psychology” researchers willing to consider optimism’s downside. She offered the example of an optimistic law student who lives at home. That student keeps all of her “family relationships, friendships and social groups” and is left to juggle those with the rigors of law school.

“Sometimes social networks are understanding of schooling that requires some 40 hours of study per week beyond class time,” Segerstrom said in an interview with her alma mater Lewis & Clark College “Chronicle” magazine. “More often than not, so there are enormous pressures if you try to maintain your relationships. In this group, the optimists had lower immune parameters, because, we believe, of what’s called the persistence model. Meaning that these optimists simply kept trying harder, kept believing they could have it all.”

Bob Condor blogs for Alternative Health Journal every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday.