For the past several years, Carver and Scheier have been trying to understand the processes that underlie people's purposive (goal-directed) actions. In developing a model of "behavioral self-regulation," they have been most interested in the recent past in examining the role played by the person's expectancies of success in dealing with problems that are encountered. In general, this research has shown that the positivity of one's expectancies serves to determine in an important way whether one will continue to persist in the face of adversity, or give up instead. This finding becomes most interesting when one realizes that these "expectancy effects" occur independently of the person's actual likelihood of dealing with the problem successfully--i.e., independent of the person's abilities, skills, and facilitative environmental resources. One limitation of previous work has been its focus on expectancies of a somewhat restricted sort--e.g., the person's expectation of being able to solve a particular task successfully, or of being able to execute a set of specific actions within a particular behavioral domain. More recently, Carver and Scheier have become interested in examining how the person's generalized outcome expectancies effect his or her motivational efforts. Previous research by these researchers and others has begun to document the benefits that generalized expectancies can have on the coping process, when those generalized expectancies are positive in nature. This research builds on prior studies of dispositional optimism-pessimism by extending the generality of the findings, and by attempting to isolate and examine some specific mechanisms whereby optimism might be having its effects. During this next period of funding, several new coping contexts will be examined, ranging from recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery to recovery from cancer surgery. All of the studies have been designed to provide information about underlying mechanisms, as well as simply examine whether or not a sense of optimism really pays off. Taken together, the proposed set of studies should facilitate understanding of the coping process in general, and the role that dispositional optimism plays in it.
