Research Hit: Optimists’ Brains Think Alike (and Pessimists’ Differ)

New research shows how optimists and pessimists process future scenarios and that optimists’ brains think more alike

I would have thought that optimists brains are similar to each other, and pessimists brains are also similar!

Yes, that would be logical — the positivity or negativity should be aligned with similar brain patterns but that is not what Kuniaki Yanagisawa and colleagues of the University of Kobe in Japan found.

What did they find precisely?

The researchers recruited 87 participants for this study (which is large for a brain scanning study) and this covered the full range of optimists and pessimists.

They were then placed in a brain scanner and asked to imagine future scenarios either by themselves or for a partner. These were prompts such as “You will take an epic trip around the world” or “You will get a big win at a horse race”. The prompts were shown for ten seconds and they were instructed to think as vividly about the future situation as they could also for 10 seconds. This could be at any time in the future.

This was done in two separate studies the first with 80 scenarios (which is a lot). And the second…