Optimism, pessimism, and false failure feedback: Effects on vigilance performance

Following the logic of a prior experiment (Seligman et al., 1990) with vars ity collegiate swimmers, sixty student volunteers performed a brief, but hi ghly stressful vigilance task. Half were then given false feedback indicati ng poor performance; the others experienced a non-evaluative display at tha t point. All were then asked to repeat the vigil. Half the observers were a ssessed as high optimists and half as high pessimists. The pessimists showe d a steeper vigilance decrement than the optimists, consistent with a model (Scheier and Carver, 1987) that proposes that pessimists are more emotion- focused under stress than optimists, and hence would be less attentive to t he vigilance display, regardless of feedback condition. The false negative feedback actually turned out to be ineffective; hence, based on Seligman's account of the swimmer study, which requires effective, negative feedback, there should have been no vigilance performance difference between optimist s and pessimists, either pre- or post-feedback.