Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading-Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children.

ABSTRACT: Believing that good things will happen in life is essential to maintain motivation and achieve highly ambitious goals. This optimism bias, the overestimation of positive outcomes, may be particularly important during childhood when motivation must be maintained in the face of negative outcomes. In a learning task, we have thus studied the mechanisms underlying the development of optimism bias. Investigating children (8 to 9 year-olds), early (12 to 13 year-olds), and late adolescents (16 to 17 year-olds), we find a consistent optimism bias across age groups. However, children were particularly hyperoptimistic, with the optimism bias decreasing with age. Using computational modeling, we show that this was driven by a reduced learning from worse-than-expected outcomes, and this reduced learn

SUBMITTER: Habicht J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7613292 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature