Seeking a Cure for Optimism

[Zeno Swijtink]

December 31, 2009
Seeking a Cure for Optimism (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/fashion/31positive.html)
By ABBY ELLIN


AMERICANS are an optimistic, can-do lot. We subscribe to the belief that we have a right to not just pursue happiness, but to be happy. No matter how grim the last year has been, no matter how rotten the economy or one’s own setbacks, people believe it can all change with the flip of the calendar: all you need do is look on the bright side.

Happiness is not just our birthright, it is a growth industry. Beyond the perpetually positive Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins and the thinking-makes-it-so gurus behind “The Secret,” the Internet offers many new programs for self-improvement. Happier.com was created in the fall with promises of “scientific solutions for real improvement.” LiveHappy, a $9.99 “mobile happiness boosting program,” is based on the book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who says that activities like “envisioning your best possible self” are “scientifically shown” to make people happier.

Is any of this true? Can an optimistic attitude and a will to happiness lead to a better you in the new year?

Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

Psychologists and others who try to study happiness scientifically often focus on the connection between positive thinking and better health. In the September 2007 issue of the journal Cancer, Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine reported his efforts to replicate the findings of a 1989 study in which he had found that women with metastatic breast cancer who were assigned to a support group lived an average 18 months longer than those who did not get such support. But in his updated research, Dr. Spiegel found that although group therapy may help women cope with their illness better, positive thinking did not significantly prolong their lives.

Ms. Ehrenreich, who was urged to think positively after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago, was surprised by how many readers shared her visceral resistance to that mantra. She created a forum on her Web site for people to vent about positive thinking, and many have. “I get so many people saying ‘thank you,’ people who go back to work after their mother has died and are told, ‘What’s the matter?’ “ she said. Likewise, there are “corporate victims who have been critics or driven out of jobs for being ‘too negative.’ “

Such criticism has annoyed those in the burgeoning academic field of positive psychology, which traces to 1998 when the president of the American Psychological Association at the time, Martin Seligman, sought out good scientific research on positive emotion. He found hundreds of studies showing the health benefits of thinking positively. While it is impossible to change one’s inherent temperament, Dr. Seligman said, “it’s certain you can change pessimism into optimism in a lasting way.”

Dr. Seligman, who now runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and makes a rather unflattering appearance in “Bright-Sided,” is not pleased with Ms. Ehrenreich’s book. In a posting on a positive psychology list serve, he accused “Barbara I Hate Hope Ehrenreich” of “cherry picking” studies to suit her purpose.

“Where Ehrenreich and I agree — we’re both trying to separate wheat from chaff,” he said in an interview. “We just differ on what we think is wheat and what we think is chaff.”

Many experts have come to question the connection between optimism and health. “Being optimistic is secondary to having health and resources,” said James C. Coyne, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who conducted a study on positive thinking and cancer and found no correlation between optimism and improved outcomes. “Ranges of cross-studies have found this,” he said.

“It’s easy to show an association between optimism and subsequent health,” he said, “but if you introduce appropriate statistical controls — if you take into account baseline health and material resources — then the effect largely goes away.”

Other experts are less definitive. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been exploring the function of positive emotions since the early 1990s. Dr. Fredrickson, whose book “Positivity” was published this year, differentiates between positive thinking and positive emotion. “Positive thinking can sometimes lead to positive emotion, but it won’t always,” she said. “It’s like the difference between wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Life is Good’ and actually feeling deep in your bones grateful for your current circumstances.”

With that in mind, she cautions that the idea of “fake it till you make it” can actually be harmful to one’s health. “What my research shows is that those insincere positive emotions — telling yourself ‘I feel good’ when you don’t — is toxic and actually more harmful than negative emotions. We need to become more sophisticated about what is real and what is fake within people’s attempts to be positive.”

Ruth Rosoff, 79, of Philadelphia, said that she has felt tyrannized by the agents of positivity. In September, she said, her husband, who had been ill for some time and had realized he would never again live the kind of life he had been used to, decided he was ready to die. “After seeing all the people who mattered to him and discussing his decision with me and our adult children, he made his wishes known to the people caring for him in the hospital,” Ms. Rosoff said.

Then a doctor who was covering for her husband’s physician stopped by. “This young man came in and proceeded to tell him about his own mother’s miraculous recovery from some illness by sheer willpower and pushed him to try harder to get better,” Ms. Rosoff said. Her husband, energized, lived a few weeks longer. “I was livid,” Ms. Rosoff said. “My husband suffered a few extra weeks with the same end result by listening to the pep talk.”

As for Ms. Ehrenreich, she believes that negative thinking is just as delusional as unquestioned positive thinking. She hopes to see a day when corporate employees “walk out when the motivational speakers start talking,” she said. “It’s all about control and money.” Her goal? To encourage realism, “trying to see the world not colored by our wishes or fears, but by reality.”

[Icssoma]

wrote one excellent response, and one less so & wordy, but the content was there. am passionate and have great belief in my pollyanna w. a solid dose of cynicism philosophy. it has stood me well through a challenging life for an upper middle class girl/woman (been w. me & reinforced and added to as i have aged, quasi gracefully: needs work.)
i don't have time now, but unlike most postings i want to come back to it, because i believe each ground has it's problems, but ultimately we need to be sustained by beauty, friendships (animals, humans, sexual and platonic...that's in reference to the human.)
had cancer, if i made a list of "challenges" it would probably rank sixth in my adult life. you get sympathy and some attention and flowers when you get cancer when you have a suicidal (at 4/5), bipolar son you get isolation, trashed, loose friends, "godmothers", ignorance, pain, and more, as you spend your life searching for answers. if i was not optimistic i would not have survived. cancer wasn't so hard, it was that i had spent two weeks in petaluma valley hospital because dr. barlas is probably a good surgeon, but paid no attention to me at my lst appointment and prescribed no antibiotics, standard for a severe crush wound, insufficient pain meds and 4 months after the reconstructive surgery needed for "a simple leg break" I was in memorial w. colon cancer. had insurance. another story. had switched from blue shield/blue cross, (now anthem) which has plenty of problems but didn't lie to me directly like the sales person for megadeath, which i switched to after thorough research. i wasn't web savvy, or probably would have done better than talking to doctors and hospitals about payment & credibility. I think megadeaths real name is mega life, hard to believe when you find after your lst surgery that anesthesia is listed under "medical accessories" which you thought were those blow in devices and bed pans, and now you have used up all your coverage, but have another surgery in 24 hours, and a reconstructive surgery in 6 weeks (the time that home care helps the wound heal so there is enough flesh that they can actually "cover the hole" w. a skin graft.) financially conservative, politically progressive, and over $500k in debt. oh yes, the lawyer did call me back about coming in for another appt. on my malpractice suit, and i did. w. the fog of chemo, and reduced strength as i approached chemotoxicity, i was 3 days late. in california you only get a guaranteed jury trial if you are file the suit w. in a year of the lst day you saw the doctor that was negligent. if you have lost a limb, or major body part, an eye, not a digits, altho, 4 fingers might be enough you usually can qualify. side note, malpractice suits cost the medical system less than 1%.
so i'm angry now, and on and off, but have tried to put that into reforming the medical (or lack of system). it's a sucky lst step, but hopefully it will get us somewhere. we need more famous people who don't have money to have their stories told.
regardless, and there are many more, my son is #1 on my list, the medical fiasco and debt are probably 4 or 5---neither the cancer or the "the simple leg break", and yes he has continued the practice that sent me for heart monitors, blood transfusions, strep, staph, and on the verge of going septic. another woman was luckier. her wound did not get infected. so the filing of the suit & my letters, discussions, & calls, did not help him be more responsible.
still angry. yes.
but grateful i am alive, every day, even if the day is sucky. grateful for friends, 2 and 4 legged. great authors and good books: kingsolver, cather, keats, mary oliver and the list is more than i could read in a lifetime, but i find it a luxury to find the time to read a novel, or see an incredible movie (finding neverland, ms. potter, revolutionary road, louis malle's les enfant...., altman's nashville, pollyanna and many more.) to have a garden, to see art, nature's and humans, for joni mitchell, judy collins, crosby, stills & nash, having seen linsecum pitch, mays played, danced and danced and will dance more, i can do that at home for free by myself. more fun w. my daughter, a friend, my partner. thank you for frank sinatra, big band, eddie harris, laura nyro, bob dylan, and again almost endless.
mj ryan has an incredible collection "attitudes of gratitude" (available on luckyhey.com where profits go to social change), along w. 365 days of health & happiness.
the secret is cult like. i appreciated one or two points that barbara x. made on jon stewart's show (yes, i am grateful for jon, bill maher, tom hartman, randy rhodes, brian copeland, terry gross, npr and more.)
blake said "gratitude is heaven". on days of pain, when suicide seems like a vacation ( a mental break, not something to act on), their are glimmers. times when the tears stop. someone hugs you, your cat rubs against your leg. you go for a walk or an amazing ride. almost everyone has access to all these things.
surround your self with quality, good friends. they will understand, and cry with you.
and you will laugh. the secret is gratitude. we live in an amazing place. we have incredible privalege. so on the darkest of days you sleep and things are better in the morning. i am a glass half full girl. i love the scene in pollyanna where she reads her locket to karl malden.
so much to change, but we will never be bored. more to say, will try to come back and edit. yes a cynical pollyanna who is grateful when i can get out of bed and see my reflection in the mirror. (thanks dad) and harry schofield, the unitarian church i was so lucky to attend from 4th grade on. every sunday was thoughtful, healing, challenging, good.
not thrilled w. the new years we just went thru, but finding new traditions to make it manageable. i prefer the jewish approach, w. the celebration, time for reflection and opportunity for reflection (i don't by the atonement stuff, but that is about finding what works for you.)

will edit. thanks for tolerating the words. got to go teach. and i'm grateful for a halftime outdoor job about 90% of the time. my students are waiting.
with love,
susan jan













December 31, 2009
Seeking a Cure for Optimism (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/fashion/31positive.html)
By ABBY ELLIN


AMERICANS are an optimistic, can-do lot. We subscribe to the belief that we have a right to not just pursue happiness, but to be happy. No matter how grim the last year has been, no matter how rotten the economy or one’s own setbacks, people believe it can all change with the flip of the calendar: all you need do is look on the bright side.

Happiness is not just our birthright, it is a growth industry. Beyond the perpetually positive Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins and the thinking-makes-it-so gurus behind “The Secret,” the Internet offers many new programs for self-improvement. Happier.com was created in the fall with promises of “scientific solutions for real improvement.” LiveHappy, a $9.99 “mobile happiness boosting program,” is based on the book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who says that activities like “envisioning your best possible self” are “scientifically shown” to make people happier.

Is any of this true? Can an optimistic attitude and a will to happiness lead to a better you in the new year?

Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

Psychologists and others who try to study happiness scientifically often focus on the connection between positive thinking and better health. In the September 2007 issue of the journal Cancer, Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine reported his efforts to replicate the findings of a 1989 study in which he had found that women with metastatic breast cancer who were assigned to a support group lived an average 18 months longer than those who did not get such support. But in his updated research, Dr. Spiegel found that although group therapy may help women cope with their illness better, positive thinking did not significantly prolong their lives.

Ms. Ehrenreich, who was urged to think positively after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago, was surprised by how many readers shared her visceral resistance to that mantra. She created a forum on her Web site for people to vent about positive thinking, and many have. “I get so many people saying ‘thank you,’ people who go back to work after their mother has died and are told, ‘What’s the matter?’ “ she said. Likewise, there are “corporate victims who have been critics or driven out of jobs for being ‘too negative.’ “

Such criticism has annoyed those in the burgeoning academic field of positive psychology, which traces to 1998 when the president of the American Psychological Association at the time, Martin Seligman, sought out good scientific research on positive emotion. He found hundreds of studies showing the health benefits of thinking positively. While it is impossible to change one’s inherent temperament, Dr. Seligman said, “it’s certain you can change pessimism into optimism in a lasting way.”

Dr. Seligman, who now runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and makes a rather unflattering appearance in “Bright-Sided,” is not pleased with Ms. Ehrenreich’s book. In a posting on a positive psychology list serve, he accused “Barbara I Hate Hope Ehrenreich” of “cherry picking” studies to suit her purpose.

“Where Ehrenreich and I agree — we’re both trying to separate wheat from chaff,” he said in an interview. “We just differ on what we think is wheat and what we think is chaff.”

Many experts have come to question the connection between optimism and health. “Being optimistic is secondary to having health and resources,” said James C. Coyne, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who conducted a study on positive thinking and cancer and found no correlation between optimism and improved outcomes. “Ranges of cross-studies have found this,” he said.

“It’s easy to show an association between optimism and subsequent health,” he said, “but if you introduce appropriate statistical controls — if you take into account baseline health and material resources — then the effect largely goes away.”

Other experts are less definitive. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been exploring the function of positive emotions since the early 1990s. Dr. Fredrickson, whose book “Positivity” was published this year, differentiates between positive thinking and positive emotion. “Positive thinking can sometimes lead to positive emotion, but it won’t always,” she said. “It’s like the difference between wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Life is Good’ and actually feeling deep in your bones grateful for your current circumstances.”

With that in mind, she cautions that the idea of “fake it till you make it” can actually be harmful to one’s health. “What my research shows is that those insincere positive emotions — telling yourself ‘I feel good’ when you don’t — is toxic and actually more harmful than negative emotions. We need to become more sophisticated about what is real and what is fake within people’s attempts to be positive.”

Ruth Rosoff, 79, of Philadelphia, said that she has felt tyrannized by the agents of positivity. In September, she said, her husband, who had been ill for some time and had realized he would never again live the kind of life he had been used to, decided he was ready to die. “After seeing all the people who mattered to him and discussing his decision with me and our adult children, he made his wishes known to the people caring for him in the hospital,” Ms. Rosoff said.

Then a doctor who was covering for her husband’s physician stopped by. “This young man came in and proceeded to tell him about his own mother’s miraculous recovery from some illness by sheer willpower and pushed him to try harder to get better,” Ms. Rosoff said. Her husband, energized, lived a few weeks longer. “I was livid,” Ms. Rosoff said. “My husband suffered a few extra weeks with the same end result by listening to the pep talk.”

As for Ms. Ehrenreich, she believes that negative thinking is just as delusional as unquestioned positive thinking. She hopes to see a day when corporate employees “walk out when the motivational speakers start talking,” she said. “It’s all about control and money.” Her goal? To encourage realism, “trying to see the world not colored by our wishes or fears, but by reality.”

[Icssoma]

ok, came back twice today to edit my post. scary. can't. i had written 2 versions, and my computer crashed during both so i haphazardly wrote a 3rd as i headed out the door.

a little like james joyce on marijuana. realize i should have done a "save as" before posting.

my points are: i like being a survivor. i want to be able to be one, otherwise thoughts of suicide would not be a mental vacation, which at most painful times has been a place i have imagined to escaping almost unbearable pain, but nothing i would ever want to act on.

i think self help books can be good, but most "programs" are like cults/religions, they fit few. many practicing catholics, not the recovering/former ones, pick and choose what they believe in, w. in the church. others opt for changing the system. and some by the belief system fully.

we share pain, and frustrations, and the best government money can buy.

i don't know about "happy" but i want to experience as much joy and beauty wherever and as often as i can find it with in a day, balancing it with less pleasurable tasks that are necessary to have a functioning pleasant home, to work towards completion of a project, to make sure one has a check book that has some basis in reality.

having an easy rhythm to a day, not packed w. an unrealistic goals, makes me happier. but setting limits is a continual challenge for me; not packing things in 6 days a week, and accepting limitations of time.

fascinating topic, but i think the commercial aspect really skews the reality. i'm not aware of anyone in my life that prescribes to such programs and books. i know many people, love and am close to friends in 12 step programs. for the most part "working the program" has seemed to make them more functional, and happier.

i don't want to go, not a fan of groups or steps--"clearly not a rules girl", but if it is helpful to ones i love, why would i want to limit their options.

i want to believe that things can and will be better, and optimism, and positive thinking are a part of my life choices. hope, faith an optimism are always somewhere to be found on my path of growth, and critical to all the social change work i have done, and want to do. it is at times overwhelming, but being overwhelmed never has been helpful.

(my personal aversion to 12 step programs, doesn't stop me from sharing concepts: one minute, one hour, one step is helpful).

i do not believe "god/life doesn't give you more than you can handle", and my belief in karma, is more mixed than it once was. i like the concept.


i think it is a mistake to confuse optimism w. happiness. or positive thinking. each are separate, linked in ways but different. looking at the up side is helpful, keeps one moving, going forward. of course there are times when we are appropriately so sad that we are physically depressed and tired. when one's body is sick, bad cold or flu, one often feels blue, not chronically depressed, but down, moderately depressed. it's a good thing because your system (mind/body) needs & wants to rest.

it is important to be able to compartmentalize pain, allowing ourselves times to revel in it, sometimes not having a choice, and as one begins to recover/heal compartmentalization is invaluable in integrating and moving through devastating events.

when one is in the midst of a serious illness there is a place for positive thinking, also one for fear, anxiety, and helplessness. again, it is a "moving through process." during both my two week hospitalizations i felt like i had been there so long there was no leaving. i hate hospitals. part of me wanted to get up and leave. easier w. cancer, physically probably couldn't have "willed my way" very far when i was in with a serious (dr. negligently induced) infection. escaping w. all those tubes is not realistic, but the thought of breaking out, and believing one will "get out", in spite of the long minutes is something to hold on to.

when one can summon the energy visualizing healing is helpful. skilled monks can lower their body temperatures. our mind/body can do amazing things. (and no i do not subscribe to the theory that one wills cancer, or other illnesses to them. of course foolish/unconscious choices can accelerate that process, but so much is in the genes.)

visualizing success w. a certain skill, for short periods of time can be virtually equal to practicing the skill (famous free throw experiments, along w. others studies show similar results.)

i dislike shopping at a local grocery store where most seem corporately forced to be 'extra polite'. these outings are occasionally necessary so i want to make the trip as short (and amusing) as i can.

we are all wired differently.

i want my son to be able to be upbeat. struggling w. a serious chemical imbalance is a challenge i can't imagine. there are limited options, and optimism is harder to come by. i haven't fully accepted the realities of his limitations, and his coming into adulthood is difficult and painful (much of it has been) but i had never, nor would i have ever wanted to imagine how hard it would be. crossing the teen terrain with a brain that has more reliable wiring is challenging.

i haven't read how-to books for years. i want my precious reading moments saved for a great novel, an occasional newspaper or magazine.

i do have multiple copies of mj ryan's books* and they are helpful. most frequently peruse for beautiful and wise words of others in attitudes of gratitude; her book on giving has helped me be a more gracious receiver of gifts (a work in progress).

and yes, friends, ("i'm so happy to see you again") books, music, dance, walking, many kinds of art, riding, animals, cuddling/sex, my surviving garden all are mood changing places to go to, as well as to get me through, and add beauty, joy and gratitude in every day.

outside of religious beliefs, or commitment to family i find it hard to think of surviving difficult times with out a healthy dose of optimism.

*available at luckyhey.com



December 31, 2009
Seeking a Cure for Optimism (https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/fashion/31positive.html)
By ABBY ELLIN


AMERICANS are an optimistic, can-do lot. We subscribe to the belief that we have a right to not just pursue happiness, but to be happy. No matter how grim the last year has been, no matter how rotten the economy or one’s own setbacks, people believe it can all change with the flip of the calendar: all you need do is look on the bright side.

Happiness is not just our birthright, it is a growth industry. Beyond the perpetually positive Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins and the thinking-makes-it-so gurus behind “The Secret,” the Internet offers many new programs for self-improvement. Happier.com was created in the fall with promises of “scientific solutions for real improvement.” LiveHappy, a $9.99 “mobile happiness boosting program,” is based on the book “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, who says that activities like “envisioning your best possible self” are “scientifically shown” to make people happier.

Is any of this true? Can an optimistic attitude and a will to happiness lead to a better you in the new year?

Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

Psychologists and others who try to study happiness scientifically often focus on the connection between positive thinking and better health. In the September 2007 issue of the journal Cancer, Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford University School of Medicine reported his efforts to replicate the findings of a 1989 study in which he had found that women with metastatic breast cancer who were assigned to a support group lived an average 18 months longer than those who did not get such support. But in his updated research, Dr. Spiegel found that although group therapy may help women cope with their illness better, positive thinking did not significantly prolong their lives.

Ms. Ehrenreich, who was urged to think positively after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer several years ago, was surprised by how many readers shared her visceral resistance to that mantra. She created a forum on her Web site for people to vent about positive thinking, and many have. “I get so many people saying ‘thank you,’ people who go back to work after their mother has died and are told, ‘What’s the matter?’ “ she said. Likewise, there are “corporate victims who have been critics or driven out of jobs for being ‘too negative.’ “

Such criticism has annoyed those in the burgeoning academic field of positive psychology, which traces to 1998 when the president of the American Psychological Association at the time, Martin Seligman, sought out good scientific research on positive emotion. He found hundreds of studies showing the health benefits of thinking positively. While it is impossible to change one’s inherent temperament, Dr. Seligman said, “it’s certain you can change pessimism into optimism in a lasting way.”

Dr. Seligman, who now runs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and makes a rather unflattering appearance in “Bright-Sided,” is not pleased with Ms. Ehrenreich’s book. In a posting on a positive psychology list serve, he accused “Barbara I Hate Hope Ehrenreich” of “cherry picking” studies to suit her purpose.

“Where Ehrenreich and I agree — we’re both trying to separate wheat from chaff,” he said in an interview. “We just differ on what we think is wheat and what we think is chaff.”

Many experts have come to question the connection between optimism and health. “Being optimistic is secondary to having health and resources,” said James C. Coyne, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who conducted a study on positive thinking and cancer and found no correlation between optimism and improved outcomes. “Ranges of cross-studies have found this,” he said.

“It’s easy to show an association between optimism and subsequent health,” he said, “but if you introduce appropriate statistical controls — if you take into account baseline health and material resources — then the effect largely goes away.”

Other experts are less definitive. Barbara L. Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been exploring the function of positive emotions since the early 1990s. Dr. Fredrickson, whose book “Positivity” was published this year, differentiates between positive thinking and positive emotion. “Positive thinking can sometimes lead to positive emotion, but it won’t always,” she said. “It’s like the difference between wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Life is Good’ and actually feeling deep in your bones grateful for your current circumstances.”

With that in mind, she cautions that the idea of “fake it till you make it” can actually be harmful to one’s health. “What my research shows is that those insincere positive emotions — telling yourself ‘I feel good’ when you don’t — is toxic and actually more harmful than negative emotions. We need to become more sophisticated about what is real and what is fake within people’s attempts to be positive.”

Ruth Rosoff, 79, of Philadelphia, said that she has felt tyrannized by the agents of positivity. In September, she said, her husband, who had been ill for some time and had realized he would never again live the kind of life he had been used to, decided he was ready to die. “After seeing all the people who mattered to him and discussing his decision with me and our adult children, he made his wishes known to the people caring for him in the hospital,” Ms. Rosoff said.

Then a doctor who was covering for her husband’s physician stopped by. “This young man came in and proceeded to tell him about his own mother’s miraculous recovery from some illness by sheer willpower and pushed him to try harder to get better,” Ms. Rosoff said. Her husband, energized, lived a few weeks longer. “I was livid,” Ms. Rosoff said. “My husband suffered a few extra weeks with the same end result by listening to the pep talk.”

As for Ms. Ehrenreich, she believes that negative thinking is just as delusional as unquestioned positive thinking. She hopes to see a day when corporate employees “walk out when the motivational speakers start talking,” she said. “It’s all about control and money.” Her goal? To encourage realism, “trying to see the world not colored by our wishes or fears, but by reality.”

[notsomuch]

We need to become more sophisticated about what is real and what is fake within people’s attempts to be positive.Key statement there. I just heard a definition for hope the other day as a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. This is another key. If you do have agency over it, then it's not a matter of hope even if that may be there.

Upon closer examination it seems clear that the less sophisticated variety of positive thinking is in fact an aversion to some real situations in life, basically denial. Ironically, you are in fact negating what is plainly so both against the reality of the situation and perhaps also against how you truly feel about the situation. Peoples idea of positivity is stuck on one end of the spectrum rather being in terms of the dynamic of how it moves, which again just means you try to force a 180 degree change rather than going with what is in fact there, be it external circumstances or your own internal state.

Why don't we just start by allowing ourselves to be however we actually are in the moment whether that involves positive or negative emotions, and then see where we can go from there? Of course that just means truly being okay with yourself, rather than some facade of positivity that is in fact in conflict or at the very least ignores that other part of yourself.

Oh yeah, and basically this amounts to the difference between living in something you would like to believe to be true, and actually accepting where you're at now but in fact doing something to actually make it happen, right? Isn't that where agency comes in?

BTW, I would think Seligman with the idea of learned helplessness might tie it in to this topic, I mean just thinking positively, hoping for the best would often assume there's nothing you can really do yourself but hope some other force will make it better, right? I can see that it can get very comfortable there, but you may overlook some real ways you can exert an influence over the situation by just repeating a mantra of positivity.

[notsomuch]

optimism, and positive thinking are a part of my life choices.

And you do have the power to choose. I would just say I think it's a mistake to attribute more power to the positive thinking, a choice, rather than the ability to choose which is power with many choices and possibilities.

These days I tend to feel mantra type of positive thinking is obsolete. Some time ago I stopped trying to make negative feelings go away, and what I've found over time is I can still function, so I don't believe it has that much power even when it shows up in its full glory.

If anything I say don't let your positivity be stagnant, in trying different things you will find different possibilities. OTOH repeating the same affirmations or something to that effect amounts to learned helplessness, because it is very, very unlikely that you have no other option than to repeat the same behavior over and over, even the same exact words! I'm really surprised there isn't something from Seligman tying this in, perhaps he doesn't appreciate the import of his earlier work. It does sound like he got a little caught up in negating the other researchers view, if we go by this article.