There's growing evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic is harming our mental health.
After a year that will remain synonymous with anxiety, isolation,
endless devastating news reports and for too many, loss.
These long-term effects on our well-being may not be surprising.
However, despite our growing collective pessimism about the state of the world,
when it comes to our own lives, research suggests we are generally optimistic.
You might expect that this private hope would have been battered by the year gone by, and yet it remains resilient.
Can optimism improve our well-being, and beyond the effects it has on us as individuals,
is optimism an accurate perspective, through which to see what can often seem like an overwhelming and unstable world.
Welcome to LSE IQ.
I'm Nathalie Abbott,
and this is the podcast where we ask social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question.
In this episode, I ask, should we be optimistic?
Being optimistic might mean more than just having a sunny disposition or choosing to see the glass half full.
In fact, optimism may be hardwired into many of us.
I spoke to Dr.
Tali Sharrett, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and author of The Optimism Bias.
I asked her to tell me about this cognitive trait.
Optimism is having positive expectations of the future,
and optimism bias is having positive explanations of the future that are more positive than the evidence should cause us to expect.