Relationships among optimism, coping styles, psychopathology, and counseling outcome

This study had two objectives. The first objective was to evaluate the discriminant validity of optimism by examining the relationships between optimism and coping styles, while controlling for psychopathology. The second objective was to evaluate how well optimism, coping styles, and psychopathology predicted counseling outcome. Participants consisted of 96 college students involved in individual counseling at a university counseling center located in the southeastern United States. Consistent with previous studies, optimism was positively correlated with task-oriented coping and social diversion (social support), and it was negatively correlated with emotion-oriented coping and avoidance (distraction) coping. However, after partially out psychopathology, only the relationship between optimism and task-oriented coping remained statistically different from zero. Both optimism and psychopathology predicted two measures of counseling outcome. In contrast, coping styles were not useful for predicting any of the outcome measures. Results provide limited support for the discriminant validity of optimism in general and the Life Orientation Test in particular.