Coping availability and stress reduction for optimistic and pessimistic individuals

It has been noted that optimists adopt active coping strategies and pessimists employ passive coping strategies. Although active coping strategies are known as adaptive, these strategies under an uncontrollable situation are considered as maladaptive according to the goodness of fit hypothesis. The present study aimed to examine the effect of coping strategies adopted by both optimists and pessimists under a controllable and an uncontrollable situation. Participants were 32 optimists and 32 pessimists selected by the Life Orientation Test. Controllability of aversive situations was operated by ratios of answerable anagram tasks. Main findings were as follows. Optimists tended to adopt active coping strategies and showed lower subjective stress than pessimists. Under a controllable situation, coping strategies adopted by optimists were correlated with subjective stress significantly, while pessimists showed no relationship between coping strategies and stress. These results indicated that high stress shown by pessimists was due to the low efficacy of adopted coping strategies. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd., All rights reserved.