OPTIMIST trial: optimistic evidence?

The Importance of Being an Optimist: Evidence from Labor Markets

Dispositional optimism is a personality trait associated with individuals who believe, either rightly or wrongly, that in general good things tend to happen to them more often than bad things. Using a novel longitudinal data set that tracks the job search performance of MBA students, we show that dispositional optimists experience significantly better job search outcomes than pessimists with si...

Portrait of an optimist

I come from a family of lawyers. When I was growing up, the only scientist in the family was my uncle, who was a physicist. But I was interested in science, and as a boy collected rocks and kept my “chemistry cabinet” in a spare room at my father’s law firm in Rome where I smelled up the place from time to time with failed experiments. When I finished high school at the Liceo Classico Torquato ...

Murphy Was an Optimist

The gaze of the optimist.

Two studies used eye tracking to investigate the attentional preferences of optimists and pessimists to negative emotional stimuli. In both studies, optimistic and pessimistic college students viewed three types of visual stimuli while having their eye movements tracked: skin cancer (melanoma) images, matched schematic line drawings, and neutral faces. In the first study, participants were aske...

Distributed Optimistic Concurrency Considered Optimistic

Optimistic concurrency relies on speculative execution, read-write conflict detection, and checkpointrollback techniques to provide a programming model that replaces locks with the abstraction of atomic, isolated execution of critical sections. Previous research has shown that on chip multi-processors, a class of workloads featuring irregular parallelism and rare read-write conflicts can reap s...