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Positive thinking may improve your emotional health: study
Looks like the researchers have cracked the code to emotional enlightenment - it's all about that positive potion! So next time you're feeling down, just remember: a dose of positive thinking a day keeps the emotional breakdowns away! #PositivelyPumpedUp
A study conducted by the Boston University School of Medicine suggests that being optimistic may contribute to better emotional well-being, particularly in older adults. The research, published in the Journals of Gerontology, followed 233 older men from the Veterans Affairs Normative Aging Study over an eight-year period.
Participants completed an Optimism questionnaire and reported daily stressors, positive and negative moods on eight consecutive evenings, up to three times over the eight-year span from 2002 to 2010. The findings indicate that individuals who were more optimistic were less likely to report negative moods. Optimism was not directly related to emotional reactivity to or recovery from daily stressors.
Optimistic men reported lower negative moods, higher positive moods, and experienced fewer stressors overall. The study suggests that optimism may be associated with more favorable emotional well-being in later life, primarily by influencing the exposure to stressors rather than the emotional stress response.
The researchers proposed that optimism may preserve emotional well-being among older adults by engaging emotion regulation strategies early in the emotion-generative process. While optimism did not significantly affect how older men emotionally reacted to or recovered from stressors, it appeared to promote emotional well-being by reducing the frequency of stressful situations or altering the interpretation of situations as stressful.
Dr. Lewina Lee, the corresponding author and clinical psychologist at the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, noted that stress negatively impacts health, and the study aimed to explore whether optimistic individuals handle daily stress more constructively, leading to better emotional well-being.
The limitations of the study include the fact that the sample was predominantly male and mostly White. Additionally, the use of emotion regulation strategies was inferred from the findings, and daily stressors were assessed concurrently, with most participants completing one or two daily diary bursts. Despite these limitations, the research sheds light on the potential link between optimism and emotional well-being in aging individuals.
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