The Effects Of Dispositional Optimism On Emotional Picture Recognition

Dispositional optimism is a personality trait, the core of the characteristics of individual positive expectations of future events. Scheier (1985) starting from the behavior of self-regulation model that behavior is largely affected by individual behavior results desired, and proposed the concept of Dispositional Optimism for the first time. Dispositional optimism the concept of the overall expectation of good results in the future, this expectation is consistent across time and situations. Optimists and pessimists’evaluation of the event is different, optimists view more positive events, pessimist view more negative events.Emotion is the attitude and corresponding behavioral responses of things, which have important impact on production, living and learning. Closely related to emotion, personality affects the emotional reactions as well as the evaluation of different scenarios, events and feelings, even individual susceptibility to emotional events and individual behavior. Different personality would have different effects on emotions, such as Turhan Canli (2001) pointed out, that extraversion is related to the response of positive stimuli in the brain; neurotic is related to the response of negative stimuli.The current studies to investigate the relationship between mood and personality are totally from the perspective of the emotional impacts on personality. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of dispositional optimism on emotional processing, and provide evidence for the elaboration of personality and emotional relationship.This study consists of two parts:the first part is dispositional optimism measurement, aiming to examine dispositional optimism distribution in population, understanding the optimists and pessimists ratio; second part for laboratory experiments, including two experiments, designed to explore different dispositional optimism type subjects is different in emotional pictures assessment and memory or not.The first part is focus on exploring the optimists and pessimists’proportion, and finding out optimists and pessimists to support subsequent experiment.The second part aims at exploring the optimists and pessimists in the assessment and memory of the same emotional pictures if there are differences. On the former research, optimists are more likely to have positive emotions; pessimists are more likely to have negative emotions. But the actual situation is still need to be revealed.Experiment 1 contains two stages, the first is for the purpose of exploring optimists and pessimists in the assessment and memory of the three different types of emotional pictures, the valence and arousal assessment scores, recognition correct rate and degree of confidence whether there are differences. The second aims to study on the short-term memory and long-term memory for emotional pictures and numbers on the recognition correct rate.According to the results of experiment 1, the procedure was improved. Experiment 2 has been redesigned as a total of two parts. The first part of the purpose is to explore the optimists and pessimists in long-term memory for emotional pictures under the conditions of the recognition correct rate, whether there is a difference between confidence degrees. The second part of the purpose is to explore the optimists and pessimists in the evaluation of negative, neutral, positive emotional pictures, the picture valence and arousal scores were assessed whether differences exist.The results show that:(1) LOT-R Chinese version has an acceptable stability, data reflected that optimism is a relatively stable characteristic; it won’t change lot over time. It is feasible to divide the optimist and pessimist according to the LOT-R scores.(2) In valence and arousal ratings, optimism main effect was not significant; valence type main effect is significant; interaction was not significant.(3) In the recognition correct rate, optimistic horizontal main effect was not significant, picture valence types have significant main effect, and two had no significant interaction effect. The confidence score, optimistic horizontal main effect was not significant, picture valence type main effect was not significant, optimism and potency type interaction was not significant.(4) In the long-term memory recognition task, discriminability index d’on optimism, main effect was not significant; picture valence type main effects were significant, the interaction was acceptable. MANOVA on interaction effect, with respect to the picture valence types, in negative condition, pessimists was lower than optimists; positive condition, pessimists was higher than optimists. On optimism, d’ of pessimists on the judgment of negative and positive pictures was not significant; d’ of optimists on the judgments of negative and positive pictures was significant.To sum up, dispositional optimism regarding the influence of emotional processing is mainly reflected in the long-term memory discriminability. There is interaction between optimists and pessimists in the judgment of negative and positive emotion pictures.