Are you an optimist?
Below are eight questions excerpted from a quiz developed by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. These questions are designed to figure out if you "catastrophize" bad events - for example, if you lose your job, do you go on with your life, looking for work, going to parties, enjoying your family, or do you generalize that failure to other parts of your life, believing you're no good at anything?
Read the description of each situation and vividly imagine it happening to you. Choose either cause A or B as the one likelier to apply to you. Do not choose what you think you should say or what would sound right to other people.
1. You miss an important engagement.
A. Sometimes my memory fails me.
B. I sometimes forget to check my appointment book.
2. You fail an important examination.
A. I wasn't as smart as the other people taking the exam.
B. I didn't prepare for it well.
3. You prepared a special meal for a friend and he/she barely touched the food.
A. I wasn't a good cook.
B. I made the meal in a rush.
4. You lose a sporting event for which you have been training for a long time.
A. I'm not very athletic.
B. I'm not good at that sport.
5. You ask a person out on a date and he/she says no.
A. I was a wreck that day.
B. I got tongue tied when I asked im/her on the date.
6. Your romantic partner wants to cool things off for a while.
A. I'm too self centered.
B. I don't spend enough time with him/her.
7. Your stocks are at an all time low.
A. I didn't know much about the business climate at the time.
B. I made a poor choice of stocks.
8. They won't honor your credit card at a store.
A. I sometimes overestimate how much money I have.
B. I sometimes forget to pay my credit card bill.
Scoring
Give yourself one point for every A you answered. If you answered A seven or eight times, you tend to catastrophize bad events. If you answered A five or six times, you have a moderate tendency to do this; 4 is average; two to three times, you are moderately optimistic and one time or not at all, you are very optimistic in this dimension. For the complete quiz, which includes questions on three other aspects of optimism, go to authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu or read Seligman's book, "Authentic Happiness."
