You don’t have to be a psychologist to know there are clear differences between a pessimist and an optimist. But did you know those differences go deeper than you think? In psychology, pessimism is associated with different psychological conditions like depression, low self-esteem, low self-efficacy and even higher accident-proneness. It’s very difficult to change a pessimist into an optimist, because this attitude is deeply engraved in someone’s personality.
In another field in psychology, cognitive psychology, a lot has been discovered about the ways people learn and how they process information. When you want to learn something new, you need to practice. One way of doing that is rehearsing the information you need to learn over and over again. The more often you repeat the information, the better the brain will retain it. This principle doesn’t only apply to academic skills like learning to speak a foreign language or acquiring technical skills, but also to behaviour.
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