Has Positive Thinking Gone Too Far?
Remarkably, the DPs performed significantly better after the negative mood induction than the positive mood induction. A similar study by Sanna (1998) utilising anagram tasks found that DPs performed best under induced negative moods and SOs performed best under induced positive moods.
.. Research has shown that DPs are typically high in anxiety. Defensive pessimism has been proposed to help such people manage their anxiety so that it does not interfere with their performance. Thus, compelling DPs to think more positively could mean suppressing a critical mechanism responsible for managing their anxiety, in turn impairing their performance on a range of tasks that are unlikely to be limited to anagrams and arithmetic tests (Norem & Chang, 2002).