Research suggests that pessimists are at higher risk of struggling with anxiety

It’s bad news for the Eeyore of this world who have a half-empty outlook on life.

According to a study, pessimists have a higher risk of struggling with anxiety.

The researchers studied 625 students who were asked to predict the grades they would expect to receive on a series of four exams.

Many students had an “optimism bias,” meaning they raised their expectations of future exam grades based on their past performance.

According to a study, pessimists have a higher risk of struggling with anxiety. The researchers studied 625 students who were asked to predict the grades they would expect to receive on a series of four exams

But pessimistic people expected the worst and therefore didn’t appropriately update their predictions of future grades when they did better than expected. These pessimists later showed greater signs of anxiety, the researchers found from a questionnaire they filled out up to three years later.

Experts suggest that pessimism is a strategy people use because they don’t want to be disappointed by unpredictable events. This is also a sign of fear, so the two can be strongly connected.

dr Aaron Heller, who led the study from the University of Miami Department of Psychology, said: “Our results suggest that people who are pessimistic learn differently from the surprises in their lives. Not only are they less optimistic, but even when small positive, surprising things happen to them, they don’t change their perspective as much as people who aren’t pessimistic, and this can put them at greater risk of anxiety symptoms.”

The study, published in the journal Science Advances, asked people to predict their scores on four difficult chemistry tests. Pessimists generally failed to upgrade their predictions for themselves when they did slightly better than expected.

The anxiety test, six months to three years later, asked questions like whether people felt anxious and nervous, or felt like they were worrying too much. The researchers used exam scores to test for pessimism because previous studies only looked at gambling tasks, which have less to do with real life.