NCJ Number
223749
Journal
Journal of Family Violence Volume: 23 Issue: 6 Dated: August 2008 Pages: 403-411
Date Published
August 2008
Length
9 pages
Annotation
This study examined the role of “dispositional optimism” (the generalized expectancy that positive outcomes are attainable) in mediating distress among students who had experienced traumatic events, including child physical abuse, emotional abuse, and sexual abuse.
Abstract
The study found that the experience of events that rose to the level of trauma was related to lower levels of dispositional optimism and greater levels of distress. On the other hand, when people had higher levels of dispositional optimism, they reported lower levels of distress despite the experience of traumatic events. Further, the study found that dispositional optimism was a partial mediator in the relationship between the experience of child physical and emotional abuse and total distress. Although the concept of dispositional optimism has not yet been applied to theories of child maltreatment, dispositional optimism has been shown to have many benefits for people, such as continuing to work toward goals even when faced with some adversity, including traumatic events. The sample consisted of 199 (138 females and 61 males) adults enrolled in undergraduate or graduate classes in a private university in Oregon. The four instruments used were the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (Bernstein and Fink, 1998), which measures traumatic events; the Life Events Checklist (Gray et al., 2004), which measures traumatic experiences; and the Life Orientation Test-Revised (Scheier et al., 1994), which measures dispositional optimism; and the Outcome Questionnaire (Lambert et al., 1996a) which measures current distress. 4 tables and 52 references