Dave Shearon, whose work focuses on the application of positive psychology to law and education, wrote an interesting article about optimists in law school for Positive Psychology News Daily. The article discusses Breaking Murphy’s Law by Susan Segerstrom, who examined the research on optimism and its effects on immune system. Shearon writes:
Segerstrom studies future-oriented optimism. Such optimists hold more strongly to expectations of future good events than to expectations of future bad events. In general, optimists have stronger immune system functions than pessimists. However, Dr. Segerstrom found in her research, beginning with that for her doctoral studies, that this relationship was not nearly as strong for law students as in most other studies. On further investigation, she found that the optimists split into two groups, one that had the expected strong immune system, and one where the immune system was somewhat suppressed.
Read the article to find out more about the two groups of optimists. One important lesson from the book is that it is not just your thoughts that count, but rather how your thinking causes you to act.
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