Aue, Nusbaum, and Cacioppo (2012), for example, documented that the optimism bias is associated with increased functional connectivity between an occipital cluster (including the left inferior occipital gyrus and fusiform gyrus) and key structures of the human reward system (including limbic and dorsal striatal regions). Joelle LeMoult, in Cognitive Biases in Health and Psychiatric Disorders, 2020 Constructs related to a positive interpretation biasĮvidence for the involvement of occipital regions (including the inferior occipital and fusiform gyri) comes from work examining the neural correlates of the optimism bias. In addition, future research on optimism bias should take into account potential interactions with other positive cognitive biases (e.g., in attention or memory) to yield a more elaborative view on healthy information processing.Įllen Jopling. Such research would greatly benefit from the use of more consistent terminology and more reliable and rigorous methods to target some of the important limitations that present and previous research on optimism bias suffers from. However, the few findings on optimism bias in patients with mental disorders must be further supported by future research. Interestingly, first attempts to compare the extent of optimism bias displayed by healthy people and patients with mental disorders reveal an absence of optimism bias in various patient groups (e.g., patients with depression, borderline personality disorder, and OCD). Whereas neuroimaging studies on optimism bias have revealed some involvement of cingulate and prefrontal brain areas in the emergence of the bias, there are no studies on the somatovisceral processes related to optimism bias so far. Even though some researchers suggest that optimism bias exists in up to 80% of the population, others argue that it may merely represent other, closely related cognitive phenomena (e.g., illusion of control). Theoretical considerations vary in the extent to which they claim the existence of an optimism bias in the general population. Such an optimistic outlook on the future can enhance their motivation to engage in self-relevant and difficult situations and make it more likely to obtain rewards. Optimism bias describes people’s tendency to overestimate their likelihood to experience positive events and underestimate their likelihood to experience negative events in the future.
Tatjana Aue, in Cognitive Biases in Health and Psychiatric Disorders, 2020 Summary