Abstract
The higher prevalence of anxiety and depression disorders in children and adolescents and the persistence of these disorders in adulthood show how important it is to investigate these concepts. Simultaneously, if we better understand the antecedents of, for example, anxiety, it will be more advantageous to define and implement some programs specifically for those ages. Like in adults, some investigations propose to study the effect of anxiety on optimism on samples of children or adolescents. In this study, we analyze the relations between anxiety, optimism, and affect in a sample of 155 students (mean age = 12 years). We took a particular interest in investigating the direction of influence between anxiety and optimism. The results showed a positive association between positive affect and anxious coping, and predictive power of these variables in explaining optimism, which seems to result from a contribution equivalent to that described on the two-factor structure of affectivity.
Highlights
The higher prevalence of anxiety and depression disorders in children and adolescents and the persistence of these disorders in adulthood show how important it is to investigate these concepts
The proposed model considers the association between the dimensions of anxiety and their explanatory contribution to positive affect and, their potential explanation to the students' optimism
We aimed to study the relations between anxiety, optimism, and affect
Summary
The higher prevalence of anxiety and depression disorders in children and adolescents and the persistence of these disorders in adulthood show how important it is to investigate these concepts. A recent work (Diaconu-Gherasim & Mãirean, 2017) found a positive correlation between dispositional optimism and judgement of future positive life events while finding that dispositional optimism did not correlate with judgment of future adverse life events These results suggest that optimists have a higher tendency to judge positive life events as more likely to happen to them. Studies that investigate positive and negative affect on samples of children and adolescents are essential, mainly because of the higher prevalence of anxiety and depression disorders on these groups and the fact that these disorders tend to persist in adulthood (Laurent et al, 1999)
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