Prospective data from the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative study of older US adults, was analyzed to examine the relationship between optimism and heart failure, adjusting for sociodemographic, biological, behavioral, and psychological covariates. Higher optimism was associated with a lower risk of incident heart failure during the follow-up period, and these effects persisted when accounting for covariates.
This article presents the development and validation of two new measures of psychological well-being: the Comprehensive Inventory of Thriving (CIT) and the Brief Inventory of Thriving (BIT). These measures were developed to measure a broad range of psychological well-being constructs and represent a holistic view of positive functioning, as well as to predict important health outcomes.