In particular, people who had this positive bias in their anticipated future emotional states had higher levels of resilience and well-being. It turned out that having unrealistically high expected levels of positive emotions was associated with several mental health benefits. In the study, the researchers asked people to rate the levels of positive and negative emotions they expected to feel in the future. The latest study to offer evidence for the advantages of an unrealistically positive attitude comes from a team of researchers in Spain and Italy. And the most optimistic attitude, of course, is not necessarily the most realistic one. More generally, as I’ve written about on here before, optimism has been linked to a wide range of mental and physical health benefits. A 2006 study, for example, found that college students with more “positive illusions” about themselves and their own abilities also reported having higher levels of well-being. Since then, psychology research has provided some support for that idea. It challenged the traditional idea that “accurate perceptions of the self, the world, and the future are essential for mental health.” After all, the authors reasoned, as much as we might aspire to have a realistic outlook on life, having an unrealistically positive attitude might have benefits of its own. One of the first psychology papers to explicitly make that case was published in 1988 by Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown, under the title Illusion and Well-being. Having a realistic view of the world might be overrated.
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