Many prominent theorists have argued that accurate perceptions of the self, the world, and the future are essential for mental health. Yet considerable research evidence suggests that overly positive selfevaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism are characteristic of normal human thought. Moreover, these illusions appear to promote other criteria of mental health, including the ability to care about others, the ability to be happy or contented, and the ability to engage in productive and creative work. These strategies may succeed, in large part, because both the social world and cognitive-processing mechanisms impose niters on incoming information that distort it in a positive direction; negative information may be isolated and represented in as unthreatening a manner as possible. These positive illusions may be especially useful when an individual receives negative feedback or is otherwise threatened and may be especially adaptive under these circumstances. Decades of psychological wisdom have established contact with reality as a hallmark of mental health. In this view, the well-adjusted person is thought to engage in accurate reality testing, whereas the individual whose vision is clouded by illusion is regarded as vulnerable to, if not already a victim of, mental illness. Despite its plausibility, this viewpoint is increasingly difficult to maintain (cf. Lazarus, 1983). A substantial amount of research testifies to the prevalence of illusion in normal human cognition (see Fiske& Taylor, 1984;Greenwald, 1980; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Sackeim, 1983; Taylor, 1983). Moreover, these illusions often involve central aspects of the self and the environment and, therefore, cannot be dismissed as inconsequential. In this article, we review research suggesting that certain illusions may be adaptive for mental health and well-being. In particular, we examine evidence that a set of interrelated positive illusions—namely, unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism—can serve a wide variety of cognitive, affective, and social functions. We also attempt to resolve the following para

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Illusion and well-being: a social psychological perspective on mental health

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Feeling and thinking : Preferences need no inferences

This article describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in subjects by hyp- notic suggestion to investigate the influence of emo- tions on memory and thinking. One result was that subjects exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; people recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in dur- ing recall. Second, emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities (e.g., angry subjects generated an- gry associates, told hostile stories, and were prone to find fault with others). Third, when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. Thus, sad readers attended more to sad material, identified with a sad character from a story, and recalled more about that character. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these several results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and per- ceptual categorization.

Mood and memory

The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.

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Bad is Stronger than Good

Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The stor- age and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components - not at the level of holistic perceptual expe- riences. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a com- mon frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspec- tion (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and ab- stract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system. Productivity results from integrating simulators combinato- rially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. Thus, a per- ceptual theory of knowledge can implement a fully functional conceptual system while avoiding problems associated with amodal sym- bol systems. Implications for cognition, neuroscience, evolution, development, and artificial intelligence are explored.

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Perceptual symbol systems.

Five alternative information processing models that relate memory for evidence to judgments based on the evidence are identified in the current social cognition literature: independent processing, availability, biased retrieval, biased encoding, and incongruity-biased encoding. A distinction between two types of judgment tasks, memory-based versus on-line, is introduced and is related to the five process models. In memory-based tasks where the availability model describes subjects' thinking, direct correlations between memory and judgment measures are obtained. In on-line tasks where any of the remaining four process models may apply, prediction of the memory-judgment relationship is equivocal but usually follows the independence model prediction of zero correlation. There ought to be a relationship between memory and judgment. Our intuition tells us that we should be able to generate more arguments and information in support of a favored position than against it, that evaluations of people should be related to the amounts of good and bad information we have about them. When a person is able to remember many arguments against a belief, or to cite many good characteristics of an acquaintance, we are surprised if they endorse the belief or dislike the person. In support of intuitions like these, names have been given to the idea that memory and judgment have a simple direct relationship, including "availability," "dominance of the given," "salience effect," and so forth. However, empirical studies of the relationship between memory and judgment with subject matter as diverse as social impressions, personal attitudes, attributions of causes for behavior, evaluations of legal culpability, and a variety of probability and frequency estimates have not revealed simple relations between memory and judgment. Some relationships have been found, but strong empirical relations are rare and results are often contradictory. Some examples seem to support the expectation of a direct relationship between memory and judgment. Tversky and Kahneman (1973) demonstrated that many judgments of numerosity were directly correlated with the "ease with which instances or associations could be brought to mind" (p. 208). In an illustrative series of experiments, they showed that judgments of the frequency of words in English text were correlated with the ease of remembering the words. Beyth-Marom and Fischhoff(1977) provided more definite evidence on the strength of the mem

https://psycnet.apa.org/journals/rev/93/3/258.pdf

The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line

Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known.

Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors.

Causes and effects of causal attribution

This research investigates the Story Model, Pennington and Hastie's (1986, 1988) explanationbased theory of decision making for juror decisions. In Experiment 1, varying the ease with which stories could be constructed affected verdict judgments and the impact of credibility evidence. Memory for evidence in all conditions was equivalent, implying that the story structure was a mediator of decisions and of the impact of credibility evidence. In Experiments 2 and 3, Ss evaluated the evidence in 3 ways. When Ss made a global judgment at the end of the case, their judgment processes followed the prescriptions of the Story Model, not of Bayesian or linear updating models. When Ss made item-by-item judgments after each evidence block, linear anchor and adjust models described their judgments. In conditions in which story construction strategies were more likely to be used, story completeness had greater effects on decisions.

Reid Hastie

Papers

The relationship between memory and judgment depends on whether the judgment task is memory-based or on-line

Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known.

Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors.

Causes and effects of causal attribution

Explaining the evidence: Tests of the Story Model for juror decision making.