IS THE GLASS HALF EMPTY OR HALF FULL?

If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought. Once upon a time there was a psychiatrist who worked in a clinic in a small town. One day he gets a new patient who is very sad and cannot laugh. The psychiatrist calls it depression and tries to treat the patient with psychotherapy and medications. Many months go by, but the patient does not get better. One day the frustrated psychiatrist says to the patient; you know what, I know what will make you laugh. There is circus in town and in that circus there is a clown. I am convinced that if you would go and see this clown you will laugh. No, I wont, replied the patient. How do you know, asked the psychiatrist, have you seen him?. The patient looked at him, lowered his eyes and said: I am that clown. Human beings come in two flavors: optimists and pessimists. Pessimism is a state of mind in which one perceives life negatively. Value judgments may vary dramatically between individuals, even when judgments of fact are undisputed. The most common example of this phenomenon is the "Is the glass half empty or half full?" situation. Martin Seligman from University of Pennsylvania studied the nature of the relationship between optimism and good health. He says that it might be that, optimists, as opposed to pessimists, are more likely to take care of their health because they believe in the potential positive outcomes. Or, it could be that optimistic people are more likeable and build better social networks, which have been associated with longevity. Another possibility is that optimistic people may have had less trauma or difficulty in their lives (a high number of negative events in a lifetime correlates with bad health). "All of these are plausible," says Seligman. Take the example of two middle-aged men - one an optimist, the other a pessimist - who find themselves in the ER following a heart attack. Other factors being equal, the optimist has a better chance of a full recovery, not because positive thinking itself changes his prognosis but because it leads to favorable changes in his behavior. The pessimist feels resigned. But the optimist is more likely to stop smoking, avoid fatty foods and salt, engage in moderate exercise and avoid stress-inducing situations. It's this change in his actions - not the sunny outlook itself - that improves his chances. We humans tend to be an optimistic bunch. In fact, it's long been established by psychologists that most people tend to be irrationally positive. The optimism bias, as it's called, accounts for the fact that we expect to live longer and be more successful than the average and we tend to underestimate the likelihood of getting a serious disease. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot writes in The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, "The data clearly shows that most people overestimate their prospects for professional achievement; expect their children to be extraordinarily gifted; miscalculate their likely life span (sometimes by twenty years or more); expect to be healthier than the average person and more successful than their peers; hugely underestimate the likelihood of divorce, cancer and unemployment; and are confident overall that their future lives will be better than those their parents put up with. This is known as the optimism bias - the inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events." Studies show that pessimism promotes passivity and hopelessness. Research by psychologist Martin Seligman demonstrates that pessimists often behave helplessly, harming their chances of achieving desirable results and even feeding depression . Winston Churchill said, "For myself, I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use being anything else." On the other hand, Arthur Schopenhauer's pessimism comes from his elevating of Will above reason as the mainspring of human thought and behavior. Schopenhauer pointed to

motivators such as hunger, sexuality, the need to care for children, and the need for shelter and personal security as the real sources of human motivation. In one metaphor, Schopenhauer compares the human intellect to a lame man who can see, but who rides on the shoulder of the blind giant of Will. The disparity between optimistic and pessimistic minds is especially prominent in areas of the brain that have been linked to depression. "The same areas that malfunction in depression are very active when people think about positive events," says Tali Sharot who conducted this research at New York University. In the study, Sharot had subjects think about emotional events, both positive and negative, like winning an award or ending a romantic relationship. They did this for past events and those that could plausibly occur in the future, while their brains were being scanned in a fMRI. Afterwards, subjects filled out a questionnaire that measured their level of optimism. What Sharot found was that when participants thought about positive future events, two regions of the brain became much more active than when they thought about negative events. One of those areas (the rostral anterior cingulated) was linked to optimism with such consistency that it surprised Sharot. "You can see it in all the subjects, indicating that it's probably very fundamental to human nature," she says. "Optimism is mediated in some very strong way in the brain." Optimism doesn't mean we turn a blind eye to negative circumstances - or we never entertain darker thoughts. But, more than we realize, our expectations influence both our perception of reality and our actions - and so alter reality itself. There is a huge payoff in seeing gray skies as just passing clouds. Optimists expect to have meaningful relationships, good health and happy, productive lives. They live longer, make better financial plans, and despair and worry less. They avoid needless anxiety and adjust better to stress. Optimism is a source of vitality and hope, courage and confidence. It motivates us to set goals, to take risks. It encourages persistence in the face of obstacles. Last year UCLA researchers discovered a gene linked to optimism. Shelly E. Taylor and her colleagues identified the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR). Oxytocin is a hormone that increases in response to stress and is associated with good social skills such as empathy and enjoying the company of others.

"This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to report a gene associated with psychological resources," said lead study author Shimon Saphire-Bernstein, a doctoral student in psychology in Taylor's laboratory. "However, we wanted to go further and see if psychological resources explain why the OXTR gene is tied to depressive symptoms. We found that the effect of OXTR on depressive symptoms was fully explained by psychological resources." At a particular location, the oxytocin receptor gene has two versions: an "A" (adenine) variant and a "G" (guanine) variant. Several studies have suggested that people with at least one "A" variant have an increased sensitivity to stress, poorer social skills and worse mental health outcomes. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-life-scientists-discover-215259.aspx