The “Anna Karenina Principle” That Explains How Optimists Differ from Pessimists

The first line of Leo Tolstoy’s famous novel Anna Karenina offers this observation:

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Based on a recent research study, there may be some science that actually proves his point. Neuroscientists studying key brain patterns among people who imagined positive events with a feeling of optimism versus those who did so with pessimism found that the optimists brain patterns were largely similar. For pessimists, those sam...