Posttraumatic Growth and Resilience: Their Distinctive Relationships with Optimism and Pessimism

Posttraumatic growth (PTG) and resilience should have distinct features due to their theoretical background, and yet their respective relationships with optimism have been consistently positive. Their relationships with pessimism have been understudied, which obscures how PTG and resilience may conceptually differ. We hypothesize that the differences may emerge whether optimism and pessimism are evaluated as cognitive expectancies or dispositional personality traits. The current study examined how optimism and pessimism would be distinctly associated with PTG and resilience, depending on whether optimism and pessimism reflect dispositional personality traits or cognitive expectancies. Midwestern United States university students (N = 347) completed an in-person survey that included measures examining optimism and pessimism as personality traits and a cognitive task estimating the likelihood of positive and negative future events happening to them and happening to others and re-estimating after obtaining novel information (i.e., belief update), in addition to PTG and resilience. Results indicated that dispositional optimism was positively associated with both PTG and resilience, whereas dispositional pessimism was negatively associated with only resilience. Furthermore, higher expectancy of positive events to be happening in the future was mostly associated with PTG whereas lower expectancy of negative events to be happening in the future was mostly associated with resilience. In addition, the perception that positive events would be more likely to happen to them than to others was only associated with resilience. Findings regarding the relationships with adjusted cognitive expectancies (i.e., belief update) were mixed. The current findings reveal potential distinctions between PTG and resilience by highlighting that they may have asymmetrical relationships with optimism and pessimism, depending on whether optimistic/pessimistic characteristics are considered as personality traits or cognitive expectations of positive and negative future events.