ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2022
Children are full of optimism, but those rose-tinted glasses are fading-Reduced learning from negative outcomes drives hyperoptimism in children.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Early Life Stress Affects Human Decision Making by Increasing Expectations of Volatility.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Learning to adaptively cooperate through social interactions during childhood and adolescence.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- Indecision and recency-weighted evidence integration in non-clinical and clinical settings.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Biased and Inflexible Interpretations of Social Situations Predict Affect Intensity and Variability in Children and Adolescents.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
- The ubiquitous sex differences in adolescent mental health: Do we overlook parts of a more complex puzzle?Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Sensitivity to the Instrumental Value of Choice Increases Across Development.Psychological science · 2024Article
- Article
- Probing apathy in children and adolescents with the Apathy Motivation Index-Child version.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Motivated Cognition in Cooperation.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Review
- Social interpretation inflexibility moderates emotional reactions to social situations in children and adolescents.Development and psychopathology · 2023Article
- Article
- Confirmatory reinforcement learning changes with age during adolescence.Developmental science · 2023Article
- Computational Mechanisms of Addiction and Anxiety: A Developmental Perspective.Biological psychiatry · 2023Review
- Local and global reward learning in the lateral frontal cortex show differential development during human adolescence.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- The promise of a model-based psychiatry: building computational models of mental ill health.The Lancet. Digital health · 2022Review
- Flexibility in valenced reinforcement learning computations across development.Child development · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Believing that good things will happen in life is essential to maintain motivation and achieve highly ambitious goals. This optimism bias, the overestimation of positive outcomes, may be particularly important during childhood when motivation must be maintained in the face of negative outcomes. In a learning task, we have thus studied the mechanisms underlying the development of optimism bias. Investigating children (8 to 9 year-olds), early (12 to 13 year-olds), and late adolescents (16 to 17 year-olds), we find a consistent optimism bias across age groups. However, children were particularly hyperoptimistic, with the optimism bias decreasing with age. Using computational modeling, we show that this was driven by a reduced learning from worse-than-expected outcomes, and this reduced learning explains why children are hyperoptimistic. Our findings thus show that insensitivity to bad outcomes in childhood helps to prevent taking on an overly realistic perspective and maintain motivation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.