You could be a developmental psychologist asking questions about how children acquire optimism. You could be doing fascinating work in neuroscience about positive mood and how it relates to problem solving. The hope is that it will cut across all areas of the field. At the University of California, Los Angeles, psychologists studying stress in first-year law students have reported that optimists enjoy heartier immune systems at midsemester than pessimists. At Cornell University, researchers have linked positive mood not only to heightened creativity and mental agility, but also to increases in brain dopamine levels and other physiological effects that improve cognition.
Enthusiasts point to applications ranging from depression-fighting techniques to character building.
But the main emphasis seems to be evangelical. Proponents are busily spreading the word. There was work on aggression and conflict and all kinds of problems, but nothing that looked at antecedents to beneficent feelings or behaviors. It seemed to me that the positive stuff had to be maintained somehow, and if we didn't understand what supports people to be helpful and caring and cooperative, those things could just as easily disappear. Although a handful of researchers such as Isen have been at work for several decades, the trend gathered momentum in 1998 when a University of Pennsylvania depression expert became president of the American Psychological Association.