Atteggiamento ottimistico verso la vita e benessere psicofisico

During the last twenty years, the research in psychology has developed a growing interest for the themes of happiness and individual well-being, focusing above all on their influence on people’s physical and psychological health. The several works about this topic have cleary emphasized that optimism acts as a protective factor toward stressant situations and toward many pathological and psychopathological manifestations (Tylor and Aspinwall, 1996; Fredrickson, 2004; Steele and Wade, 2004). Neverthless, near these data, other reapprise considerably the benefical effects of optimism on health and suggest that a specific form of optimism -the unrealistic optimism- can even rappresent a subjective risk factor, inducing people to underestimate environmental risks and to behave in a dangerous way (Weinstein, 1980). The main purpose of this work is to analyse all these aspect of optimism, discussing the main theoretical frameworks and researches available in literature