Overview

• The study, published July 21 in PNAS, recruited 87 participants spanning the optimism–pessimism spectrum and recorded medial prefrontal cortex activity with fMRI as they envisioned future events of varying emotional valence.
• Optimistic individuals exhibited highly similar MPFC activation patterns, suggesting a shared neural framework for imagining positive, neutral and negative futures.
• Pessimists showed diverse and idiosyncratic brain patterns in the same region, reflecting varied cognitive models when thinking about future scenarios.
• Optimists demonstrated greater neural separation between positive and negative future events, indicating more abstract and psychologically distant processing of negative outcomes.
• Researchers are now conducting follow-up studies to explore whether these convergent neural patterns are rooted in innate biology or shaped through social learning and experience.