Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.
There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they have imagined themselves in those situations (Johnson and Sherman, 1990), implying that some record of that simulation influences later behavior. There is typically a high correspondence of stated... See more