Agency, Optimism, and the Longitudinal Course of Anxiety and Well-Being

Abstract

Positive expectancies for the future provide an important pathway to the development of mental health and resilience against the development of mental illness. Generalized expectancies in the form of optimism beliefs and specific positive expectancies regarding personal agency have both been shown to predict higher levels of mental health and lower levels of mental illness. Previous research, however, has generally been limited by the failure to establish the incremental validity of agency and optimism theories and the reliance on cross-sectional designs. Therefore, the present study attempted to improve our understanding of how positive expectancies relate to mental health by longitudinally examining the unique effects of agency and optimism on anxiety and well-being. Results demonstrated that agency and optimism both have robust effects on mean levels of anxiety and well-being across time, but that agency beliefs are consistently a better predictor of improved psychological functioning than is optimism. These results therefore demonstrate that positive expectancies are important contributors to the development of mental health and the prevention of mental illness, and that positive expectancies regarding a sense of personal agency are the more important predictor of adaptive psychological functioning.