The Effect of Encouragement on Defensive Pessimism as an Anxiety Amplifier

The past literature indicates that performance is disrupted for defensive pessimists by encouragement. The goals of this research were to replicate this phenomenon, and then examine the mechanisms underlying it. Specifically, does the encouragement alleviate the anxiety defensive pessimists harness, and thus leave them unmotivated, or does it increase the pressure to perform well and make them overly anxious in a way that interferes with performance? Participants both high and low on defensive pessimism were randomly assigned to one of 2 conditions: an encouragement condition and a control condition. Participants were given three sets of 15 anagrams to solve in between a series of measures designed to assess their appraisals and emotions during the task. The phenomenon of encouragement disrupting performance for defensive pessimists was not replicated. However, there was evidence suggesting that the 4 negative items of the DPQ were a more reliable and valid indicator of defensive pessimism than the full scale. Therefore the reduced scale was used for analyses. Non-predicted findings using this reduced scale are described. Discussion centers on the possible reasons the original effect was not replicated, and advances suggestions for improving research on the defensive pessimism construct. The Effect of Encouragement on Defensive Pessimism as an Anxiety Amplifier The cognitive processes that guide our actions and interpretations of situations are a large part of what makes up human personality. Processes such as defense mechanisms help to shape how humans handle stressful situations. Defense mechanisms focus on negative affect and protection of the self. These mechanisms affect how we study, handle family member’s sicknesses, tackle errands, deal with confrontations, strategize to obtain personal goals, etc. The particular mechanism I am interested in pursuing is Defensive Pessimism. Defensive Pessimism is a cognitive strategy in which people set low expectations and reflect extensively on possible (negative) outcomes prior to a situation, event, or performance. Defensive pessimism seems to be different than normal strategies for obtaining goals in that it actually elicits and then harnesses anxiety in an attempt to avoid failure and the (presumably) more negative emotions that failure would evoke. Therefore, the defensive pessimism and negative thinking are not symptoms to be cured, but rather effective ways of managing the situation. In a sense, it is a type of coping, where thinking about these negative outcomes and increasing their anxiety motivates them to work hard. As they approach their goals they keep their anxiety from interfering by focusing on the steps needed to obtain goals and avoid failure, and the emotional implications of failure. Psychological experimentation in this has examined a number of different aspects of defensive pessimism, usually compared against Strategic Optimism, where people set high expectations, feel calm, and avoid reflecting in order to do better at a task (Norem & Illingworth, 1993) Studies have demonstrated the actions of defensive pessimists to be useful. Norem and Cantor believe that defensive pessimists harness their anxiety over risky situations in order to control it so performance is not impaired (Norem & Cantor, 1986). The main purpose of their experiment was to test the hypothesis that those prescreened for defensive pessimism, relative to those identified as strategic optimists, would set predictably different expectations and exhibit predictably different anxiety levels before the start of the task and would not perform significantly different on the task. In their experiment they first prescreened the participants for using the strategy of Defensive Pessimism, and after used the Mandler-Sarason Test Anxiety Questionnaire to determine the level of anxiety the participants felt prior to the task. In the experiment the observed results were strongly in line with the investigators’ predictions. The defensive pessimists gave lower predictions of performance, scored significantly higher on anxiety, yet, still had equivalent test results compared to the optimists. In a second experiment, the investigators set out to demonstrate that not only does the high anxiety and low expectations not hurt the performance of defensive pessimists, but instead it facilitates it. They wanted to see if interference with their strategy (harnessing anxiety and negative thinking) leads to decreased performance for subjects accustomed to using the defensive-pessimism strategy. They used encouragement as their interfering mechanism, which was interesting because it should interfere with the defensive pessimists tendencies to set low expectations, but on the surface appears to serve to help individuals improve their performance. Participants were prescreened for using defensive pessimism or optimism and then placed into encouragement and non-encouragement conditions. They were asked to give their GPA and to write a paragraph stating their thoughts before the night of a big test. In the encouragement condition, the experimenter looked at their GPA before starting them on the task and indicated that the subjects would probably do very well on the experimental task. Participants were then asked to do a tracing-puzzle task and an anagram task. In the non-encouragement condition, participants did the same tasks, but without the encouraging comment prior to the task. The results indicated that encouraged pessimists performed significantly worse than did non-encouraged pessimists, thus supporting Norem’s belief that defensive pessimism is a useful strategy that people use in risky situations. Many situations that people encounter represent both the possibility for success and the possibility for failure. The possibility for failure can be interpreted as a risky situation where people use differing strategies to deal with the situation or avoid having the situation become debilitating or immobilizing. In one study (Norem & Illingworth, 2003), mood was assessed. Participants were prescreened for defensive pessimism and strategic optimism, then brought into the study session and a brief inventory was given to assess their naturally occurring mood. They were then asked to work on 70 mental arithmetic problems for 10 minutes. The findings indicate that for defensive pessimists, there was a significantly greater negative mood than with strategic optimists. Naturally occurring positive mood was somewhat negatively related to performance for defensive pessimists, but was unrelated to mood for strategic optimists. They also found that in this study, unlike previous ones, that defensive pessimists did not perform as well as strategic optimists. They suggest that this performance difference might possibly be attributable to a gender difference, because the male/female ratio for defensive pessimists (18 males and 35 females) was much lower than for strategic optimists, (22 males and 29 females), and the authors observed that college women often under-perform on math tests relative to college men. These studies suggest that defensive pessimism is an interesting coping strategy in that it employs negative affect to encourage good performance. The observation that encouragement disrupts performance for defensive pessimists is particularly interesting. However, there appear to be a couple of gaps in the literature that I attempt to address in the present literature. First, the mechanism by which encouragement disrupts the performance of defensive pessimists is somewhat unclear at present, and at least two possibilities suggest themselves. First, in line with the findings above, suggesting that defensive pessimists perform better when they are experiencing negative affect than when they are experiencing positive affect, it could be that the encouragement alleviates their anxiety, and leaves them relatively unmotivated. A contrasting possibility is that the encouragement, by undermining the defensive pessimists low performance expectations puts added pressure on them, which makes them overly anxious in a way that undermines their performance. Thus a primary goal of the present research is to replicate the disruptive effects of encouragement for defensive pessimists, but to do so in a way that allows me to differentiate between these two possibilities. To accomplish these goals, I will draw upon appraisal theory (e.g., Smith & Lazarus, 1990) to closely examine the emotional processes underlying these debilitating effects of encouragement. In particular, I will engage defensive pessimists in a challenging task under conditions of encouragement or a no-encouragement control condition, and will assess variables derived from appraisal theory (motivational relevance, or how important the situation is to the person; motivational congruence, or how desirable or undesirable the situation is to the person; problemfocused coping potential, or how able the person believes themselves to be to succeed at the task; emotion-focused coping potential, or how able the person feels to deal with the situation however it turns out [associated with anxiety] as well as the emotions of anxiety, challenge/determination [associated with high levels of engagement in the task] and resignation [associated with low levels of engagement in the task]; Smith & Lazarus, 1990). Observation of these variables should allow me to differentiate between the two alternative explanations for the deleterious effects of encouragement for defensive pessimists. If the encouragement serves as a safety signal that lowers their motivation, under conditions of encouragement, and relative to strategic optimists, defensive pessimists should report relatively low levels of importance and undesirability, relatively high levels of both problemand emotion-focused coping potential, along with relatively low levels of anxiety, and challenge-determination. On the other-hand if the encouragement increases the performance pressure on defensive pessimists to a debilitating degree, for this encouraged defensive pessimists we should observe elevated levels of appraised emotional relevance and undesirability, accompanied by relatively low levels of both problemand emotionfocused coping potential, accompanied by high levels of anxiety and resignation, as well as low levels of challenge/determination. A second goal associated with this research is to examine the dispositional correlates of defensive pessimism. In the existing research there have been very few attempts to relate defensive pessimism to other dispositional characteristics, such as self-esteem, trait anxiety, dispositional optimism and the like. Knowing how defensive pessimism relates to such important dispositional characteristics seems important for understanding this style of coping with academic stress, and its likely long-term costs and benefits to long-term adaptive functioning. Therefore in the present study, in addition to examining the affective processes associated with the effects of encouragement on coping in defensive pessimists, I will also examine how defensive pessimism as an individual difference variable relates to other important dispositions and aspects of the self.