With twins like Trudi and Debbie they have found changes in just five genes in the brain's hippocampus which they believe have triggered depression in Debbie. Spector, who describes himself as an optimist, hopes that this research will lead to improved treatments for depression and anxiety. We now know there are these mini mechanisms that can switch them on and off.
We're regaining control, if you like, of our genes. Even more surprising is research which has identified changes in the activity of genes caused by the presence or absence of maternal love. Prof Michael Meaney, from McGill University in Canada, is investigating ways to measure how many glucocorticoid receptors are activated in someone's brain.
The number of active glucocorticoid receptors is an indicator of that person's ability to withstand stress. It may also be a measure of how well mothered they were at a young age - reflecting how anxious and stressed their mothers were, and how this impacted on the amount of affection they received in their early years.
I am one of a small handful of people who have done their test and had the results. I haven't told my mother yet. I see myself as being more at the pessimistic end of the spectrum but would like to change, so I went to visit psychologist and neuroscientist Prof Elaine Fox at her laboratory at Essex University.
Fox is interested in how our "affective mindset", the way we view the world, shapes us. As well as using questionnaires she and her team look for specific patterns of brain activity. They began by measuring the levels of electrical activity on the two sides of my brain with an electroencephalograph.
It turns out I have more electrical activity in my right frontal cortex than my left. This, Fox explains, is associated with people who are prone to higher levels of pessimism and anxiety.
When prompted to be in a good mood, defensive pessimists performed poorly on a series of word puzzles. However, when they were put in bad mood, by being instructed to imagine how a scenario might have negative outcomes, they performed significantly better. This suggests that they harness their negative mood to motivate themselves to perform better. Pessimism can also be more beneficial than optimism in situations where you are waiting for news about an outcome and there is no opportunity to influence the outcome such as waiting for the results of a job interview.
When the outcome is not as good as optimists had hoped for, they take a bigger hit to their wellbeing and experience greater disappointment and negative mood than do your garden-variety pessimists. Strangely, this type of pessimism can even help boost confidence. In one study that followed students throughout their university years, those who were defensive pessimists experienced significantly higher levels of self-esteem compared to other anxious students.
In fact, their self-esteem rose to almost the levels of the optimists over the four years of the study. Although these individuals will worry more about getting ill during an outbreak of an infectious disease compared to optimists, they are also more likely to take preventive action. For example, they might frequently wash their hands and seek medical care promptly when they experience any unusual symptoms. When pessimists become chronically ill, their negative view of the future may be more realistic and encourage the sort of behaviours that healthcare professionals recommend for managing their illness.
I conducted a study with two groups of people — those with either inflammatory bowel disease IBD or arthritis — and asked them to rate their future health on a simple scale ranging from poor to excellent.
Despite their differences in focus and historical perspective, they all strive to make us better understand the world we live in. All three books present refreshing counterpoints to the general pessimism that underpins the ambient populism and dystopian fears. Surely, not everything is getting better. People still die too early, often from communicable and avoidable diseases. Man-made disasters also strike too often. This would not be development. This would be a miracle.
Pinker and Rosling document in detail—with well-crafted statistics, laid out over hundreds of pages—the many ways in which the world has become a better place on almost all accounts. Simply put, it is undeniable that people in most parts of the world are getting wealthier, healthier, and wiser. The belief or perception that things are much worse than they really are is widespread and I believe it comes with significant detrimental impacts on societies.
If you think that disaster can strike you at any moment, you will most likely overinvest in safeguarding your security and underinvest in your education or other aspects of your well-being. At the same time, the opposite perception—that things are always and necessarily changing for the better—can also be counterproductive for, if so, why bother trying to make a change? A more constructive approach is one that acknowledges that things are getting better but that this progress is neither automatic nor optimal.
But if the facts are so clear, why are we all still so pessimistic?
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