Effect of optimism/pessimism attitude on depression and coping strategies

Abstract

Depression is a word used by mental health professional to refer an illness or group of illness called mood disorder. Depression may be described as feeling sad, blue, unhappy, miserable, or down in the dumps. Most of us feel this way at one time or another for short periods. It's impossible to escape life's ups and downs. Feeling unhappy or sad in response to disappointment, loss, frustration or a medical condition is normal. Many people use the word to explain these kinds of feelings, but that is really situational depression, which is a normal reaction to events around us. Clinical depression, though, overwhelms and engulfs your day to day life, interfering with your ability to work, study, eat, sleep, and have fun. It is unrelenting, with little if any relief. True clinical depression is a mood disorder in which feelings of sadness, loss, anger, or frustration interfere with everyday life for an extended period of it.There is a difference, however, between a normal grief reaction and one that is disabling or unrelenting. While there's no set timetable for grieving, if it doesn't let up over time or extinguishes all signs of joy laughing at a good joke, brightening in response to a hug, appreciating a beautiful sunsetit may be depression. Brown and Haris (1978) reported that depression increases with the age due to several factors of day today life like burden of responsibility, sleeping problems, declining health etc.Coping strategies refer to the specific efforts, both behavioral and psychological, that people employ to master, tolerate, reduce, or minimize stressful events.There are many different ways of coping but they all involve making some change in input-output relationships. Thus some methods of coping involve changing, controlling and even avoiding certain inputs, whether the problem is attacked by working on inputs that in internal processes or outputs, it will be one of the two major ways of adjustingdefensive coping or direct coping. Defensive coping involves protecting oneself by getting away from threatening inputs. Direct coping involves meeting challenges head on. Coping with stress may begin with the occurrence of a stressful even, during exposure to stressor and finally after it has taken places. However, successful coping with stress should depend on a number of factors such as individual attitude, perception of life stress and suffering and personal skills, capability of problem solving and decision making. Raju, Rohini, and Naga (2008) revealed that among the old age people 21.3% of them were severely depressed and diabetes is experienced mostly by the elderly whose age is between 70-80 years. The severely depressed older adults were suffering with blood pressure and asthma. The mildly depressed older adult's experiences suicidal tendencies, hearing problems, loneliness, diabetes and problem with the eyes.Sahu, (2007) found gender differences on life stress and significant negative relationship between life stress and coping was observed. It was also extended for males but this relationship was not found significant for females. Folkman, S. and Lazarus, R.S (1980) evaluated age difference in the use of problem focused coping and emotion focused coping among individuals aged 45 to 64. The younger group was found to use emotion focused approach more i.e. they used more of accepting responsibility, distancing more than o lder group.Considering the above facts the present study was undertaken to observe the Optimists and Pessimists on Depression and Coping strategies.Hypotheses of the studyTo achieve the main objective of the study following hypothesis are framed;* Optimists will have significantly low level of Depression as compared to Pessimists and its dimensions.* Optimists and pessimists will differ significantly on the tendency of using Coping Strategies and its dimensions.MethodParticipantsThe total sample was consisted of 255 optimists and 191 pessimists subjects. …