Optimists share similar brain patterns when thinking about the future, scans show | Psychology

Whether it is an examination, a flight or health control, some people have a sunny view of the future while other planning disasters.

Now, researchers have discovered that people with optimistic perspective show similar models of brain activity when they reflect on future scenarios.

“Optimists seem to use a shared neuronal framework to organize thoughts on the future, which probably reflects a similar style of mental treatment rather than identical ideas,” said Kuniaki Yanagisawa, the first author of the Kobe University research in Japan.

He said the results could shed light on the previous results showing that optimists tended to succeed more socially.

“What is that [new study] Tells us that the foundation of their social success could be this shared reality, “he added.” It is not only a question of having a positive attitude; It is that their brain is literally on the same wavelength, which can allow a deeper and more intuitive connection. »»

In the acts of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said they asked 87 participants to fill out a questionnaire to reveal how optimistic they were.

Each participant also underwent an MRI cerebral analysis, during which it was asked to imagine various possible future life events, some of which were positive – like making an “epic journey through the world” – while others were neutral or negative, such as dismissal. A subset of the participants was invited to imagine scenarios related to death.

The team found that participants who were more optimistic showed greater similarities in the models of their brain activity in a region involved in thought -oriented thought, called the Médial Cortex (MPFC)

Yanagisawa said that the possibility was that the more diversified brain activity among pessimists reflected a set of more varied concerns when reflecting on negative scenarios.

However, he said that another possibility was that the optimists considered their future in a shared framework of socially accepted objectives whose pessimists could feel disconnected for personal reasons, which means that they each had a different way of thinking about the future.

The researchers said that the results had parallels with the first line of the novel by Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina: “Happy families all look alike; Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. “

“Based on this principle, we propose that optimistic individuals all look alike, but each less optimistic individual imagines the future in his own way,” wrote the team.

Researchers have also found brain activity models in the MPFC have shown clearer differences for positive and negative future events in optimists.

“This suggests that optimists not only” think “in a structural sense, but they also process emotional information about the future differently with a greater ability to separate what is bad, which can help them to remain resilient,” said Yanagisawa.

He declared that previous work had associated this kind of clearer separation with a more abstract and psychologically distant way to think of negative events.

“We do not say that optimists have identical thoughts on the future, or that they imagine exactly the same scenarios,” said Yanadisawa. “On the contrary, what we have found is that their brains represent future events in the same way, especially in the way they distinguish positive and negative possibilities. So, even if we would not say that they have the same thoughts, we can say that they seem to think in the same way – structurally.”

Professor Lisa Bortolotti of the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, which was not involved in the work, said that the study suggested that optimists represent future negative events in less lively and concrete details than the most lively potential scenarios affected them.

“These results could suggest that optimism is not a form of irrationality or distortion of reality because that does not change the way we see things there, but how these things have an impact,” she added.

Bortolotti said that assuming that things will not be mistaken that does not bring any advantage if it left us not prepared for challenges, but noted that optimism worked when it motivated us to pursue goals.

“Pilling a positive remainder in detail as feasible and desirable makes us value it and work for this, which ultimately makes us more likely that we will succeed,” she said.