The postive power of negative thinking

For all of you positive thinkers out there check out this article. Seems it depends more on the type of person you are whether positive thinking will work for you. For some negative thinking actually works better. A few excerpts:

"In a series of clever studies, the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor compared strategic optimists and defensive pessimists. If you're a strategic optimist, you envision the best possible outcome and then eagerly plan to make it happen. If you're a defensive pessimist, even if you've been successful in the past, you know this time could be different. You start picturing all the things that could go wrong.


"Most people assume that strategic optimists outperform defensive pessimists, because they benefit from confidence and high expectations. Norem and Cantor found that defensive pessimists were more anxious and set lower expectations for themselves in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks. Yet they didn't perform any worse. [...] By imagining the worst-case scenario, defensive pessimists motivate themselves to prepare more and try harder.

"If you're the kind of person who's always telling other people to look on the bright side, you might want to reconsider. Whether people succeed is not a matter of thinking positively or negatively, but rather whether they choose the strategies that match their thinking styles."

Here are more articles on this fact:

The power of negative thinking.
Another one of the power of negative thinking.