Confident Person, Happy Life? A Longitudinal Investigation of the Reciprocity between Trait Optimism and General Life Satisfaction

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201214.586How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Optimism, life satisfaction, causal relationships

Abstract

Optimism, a tendency of being focused on positive versus negative expectations for the future, has been well-documented in literature that positively affects various outcomes, such as physical and mental health, career success as well as interpersonal relationship. While psychological research has a long tradition to treat trait optimism as a disposition with limited variability, recent personality studies support a dynamic personality theory – personality traits fluctuate across the whole life span, and are heavily predicted by environments and personal experiences. Given the vital role of trait optimism in several cognitive and social processes, a better understanding of the variation of optimism and its potential antecedents is of vital significance. Abundant previous research that used cross-sectional data has suggested a secure connection between trait optimism and general life satisfaction. At the same time, as a manifestation of the emotions of daily life events, life satisfaction may also change optimism. This study, with a longitudinal design, examined the association of general life satisfaction and trait optimism over seven years, and pay special attention to test whether general life satisfaction truly affects the level of optimism. A newly developed Random Intercept Cross Lagged Panel Model (RI-CLPM) is applied that effectively disentangles the between- and within- relationships and that offers a potential causal perspective. The results replicated previous findings by illustrating the positive effect of optimism on life satisfaction. Furthermore, interestingly, the effect of general life satisfaction on optimism was estimated to be negative. We offered plausible explanations via the gambler’s fallacy. Future research can further explore the influence mechanism of life satisfaction on optimism.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xinyi Wei
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/16
TI  - Confident Person, Happy Life? A Longitudinal Investigation of the Reciprocity between Trait Optimism and General Life Satisfaction
BT  - Proceedings of the 2020 3rd International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 670
EP  - 677
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201214.586
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201214.586
ID  - Wei2020
ER  -