Our results show that unrealistic optimism can make individuals take inadequate precautions and unrealistic pessimism can lead to excessive precautions. Likewise, when pessimists got gamble results in the first round that were contrary to their pessimistic expectations, their levels of unrealistic pessimism reduced in the second round and they purchased lesser insurance compared to the first round. Additionally, when the optimists in our study got first-round gamble results that were contrary to their optimistic expectations, their levels of unrealistic optimism reduced in the second round and it led to increased insurance purchase in that round. The results show that, when participants are unrealistically optimistic, they purchase less insurance compared to the control group to protect themselves from the gamble losses and vice versa. We made participants play an insurance decision game pertaining to a gamble for two consecutive rounds while inducing unrealistic optimism and pessimism within the context of the game. We also attempted to extend the theory of unrealistic optimism and pessimism by investigating how past events running contrary to expectations impact unrealistic optimism and pessimism. In this study, we performed experiments to investigate the negative consequences of unrealistic optimism and pessimism. Our findings may be a valuable cue for coping with crisis situations. However, there was an effect of positive emotions (both automatic and reflective) having a protective role from the feeling of general anxiety, which was significant for the older group only. We created models accounting for the variance of general anxiety, finding significant predictors for both separate groups of younger and older adults (negative emotions, both automatic and reflective and preventive behaviours). Unrealistic optimism was also positively correlated with negative automatic emotions and negatively correlated with positive reflective emotions. The results allowed us to confirm the occurrence of unrealistic optimism bias (being significantly stronger for men than women), which correlated negatively with the declared number of preventive behaviours. We also measured twelve specific emotions (differing in valence and origin) and the feeling of the anxiety caused by the coronavirus.
In our study, we explored unrealistic optimism bias (the cognitive error giving people a feeling of invulnerability) and any declared preventive behaviours undertaken in order to minimise the risk of contagion.
The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic (and its consequences, such as lockdown and public health regimes) was a novel and stressful situation for most of people, and, as such, it significantly affected both cognitive and emotional functioning of individuals.
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