If your pessimism score is in the average range, it will not be a problem in ordinary times. But in crisis, in the hard times life deals us all, you will likely pay an unnecessary price. When these events strike, you may find yourself getting more depressed than you should.

Although many thousands of patients have had hundreds of thousands of sessions, psychoanalytic therapy has not been demonstrated to work for depression.

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault.

These simple results directly identified the source of learned helplessness. It was caused by experience in which subjects learned that nothing they did mattered and that their responses didn’t work to bring them what they wanted.

Habitual pessimistic thoughts merely carry this useful process one detrimental step further. They not only grab our attention; they circle unceasingly through our minds.

Ellis believed that what others thought of as deep neurotic conflict was simply bad thinking—“stupid behavior on the part of nonstupid people,” he called it—and in a loud, propagandistic way (he called himself a counterpropagandist) he would demand that his patients stop thinking wrong and start thinking right.

The first step is just knowing your beliefs warrant dispute. The next step is putting disputation into practice.

Our approach drew on Bernard Weiner’s attribution theory, but it differed from Weiner in three ways.

Today Madelon is chairperson of the Department of Pediatric Nursing at the Yale School of Medicine.