Ottimismo disposizionale e coping emotivo

The current paper highlights the relationships and binding net between dispositional optimism and emotional coping. The starting point is that dispositional optimism, meant as a perspective on future life events, affects emotional coping processes, both in the appraisal of stressful events, and in behaviours enacted in order to cope with the emotion thus generated. Moreover, since coping is a mediator of emotions, and emotions and coping affect each other, dispositional optimism is a likely candidate to enhance positive emotions. Within this framework, after drawing attention to state-of-the-art research issues on dispositional optimism and emotional coping, preliminary results of an empirical study aimed at exploring whether and how dispositional optimism can shape optimists' and pessimists' emotional coping processes in an emotional written disclosure task, will be discussed