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Defensive Pessimism

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Types of Pessimism

1) Dispositional Pessimism

• People with this type of pessimism tend to believe that when bad things happen to them it is because their own fault and it will lead to other bad things happening to them, and then bad things will keep on happening to them forever.
• In other words, they believe that bad outcomes are personal, pervasive, and permanent.
• As a dispositional pessimist person, you will conclude that it is all your fault, that you will fail at everything you do, and that you will never again be successful at anything that you do in your life.
• Hence due to the above reasons it has been found that chronic dispositional pessimism leads to the feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, withdrawal, and depression. …show more content…

Research Studies Relating to the types of the Pessimism

1. Research by Norem, J.K. (2001). Defensive pessimism, optimism, and pessimism
In this research the author compared defensive pessimism, optimism and pessimism and it was observed that defensive pessimism is not a global, internal and stable attribution style, but it is rather a cognitive thought process or strategy that can be utilized within the context of certain goals unlike dispositional pessimism which is a global, internal and stable attribution style.
This means that dispositional pessimism deals with the fact that the negative outcomes happening are a due to his fault (internal) and he believes negative in everything (global) where as for a defensive pessimist negative outcomes are only some specific situations and every negative outcome is not their fault.

2. Research by Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). Defensive pessimism: harnessing anxiety as motivation. Journal of personality and social …show more content…

Instead, a defensive pessimist would try and anticipate possible challenges that he could face in an upcoming job interview for example challenges like dress code, stubborn interviewers, and tough questions – and prepare rigorously to face them so as they have considered all the “bad things” that can happen to them in the job interviews, they work on the “bad things” and they prepare themselves mentally and physically incase any of these “bad things” come up and they can deal with the situation better than strategic

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