OPTIMISM                    Effects of Optimism on Physical and Psychological Health   Luca Harvey PSY/220 10/13/2011 Chris Griffin Axia               Optimism can be defined as a person’s capacity to understand and recognize upcoming events with a positive perspective. In due course, it is the people who possess a degree of optimism that ultimately feel as though they will have positive results from upcoming circumstances. There have been many studies conducted in regard to the connection between a person’s optimism and their health. The outcomes of these studies have deemed that possessing optimism enhances a person’s physical and psychological health.  The article that will be discussed contains a compilation of many of these studies and effectively connects these two facets for the reader (Rabiega & Cannon, 2007). More specifically, the article connects the association between disease and infection with a person’s ability to recover from an operation or treatment. Additionally, the article elaborates on a person’s psychological well-being by breaking down the likelihood of an individual developing a mental illness such as depression as a result of their optimism.             One of the primary findings of the article was the fact that people who maintain a higher degree of optimism are most-likely to be in better health when compared to people who were deficient of it. More specifically, some of the studies that were conducted demonstrated that optimistic people tend to suffer less from overall sickness (Rabiega & Cannon, 2007). Additionally, optimistic people are more inclined to be involved in preventive medicine, which includes (but is not limited to) exercise, healthy diet, regular doctor visits, and refraining from addictive substances (Rabiega & Cannon, 2007). When it comes to surgery, recovery seems to occur faster in patients who maintained a high degree of optimism (Rabiega & Cannon, 2007)...