The Role of Arousal and Optimism Bias in the Perceived Susceptibility to Negative Life Events

Negative life events take a significant part of everyone’s life. However, to cope with this negative information, people strive to and create inaccurate delusions that enhance their self-esteem. Researchers often postulate that people fail to update beliefs because their self-esteem is threatened accurately. In the present study, we test this idea by assessing physiological reactions to threatening information. The research question of our study is how different types of threats influence arousal and belief updating. To test this, we conducted a lab experiment with the use of pupillometry. The task included trivial and significant negative life events, that needed to be evaluated twice - before and after the actual probability was shown. The information about events was formed in 2 conditions: we asked participants to estimate the probability for self and for people in general. This study involves 2 x 2 within-subject experimental design with a sample of 20 students and alumni of Tilburg University (age M = 21.3, SD = 3.5, female 65%). We found that people show the highest level of belief updating for trivial general negative life events and the lowest for self significant. For the pupil size change findings were the opposite: higher levels of physiological reactions were associated with the strong optimism bias. Keywords: Optimism bias, arousal, pupillometry, belief updating, negative life events