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A unified account of why optimism declines in childhood

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 4, pages 35–48 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Optimism is linked to a range of positive social and cognitive outcomes across development. Yet decades of work in psychological science has revealed that optimism declines throughout early childhood. Despite this well-documented decline, there is no agreed-upon theory that accounts for developmental changes in optimism. In this Perspective, we synthesize cognitive, computational, social and neural evidence and discuss three candidate mechanisms that might underlie declines in optimism with age: learning from experience, changing theories of success and wishful thinking, and shifts in valenced learning biases. We argue that declining optimism across childhood is best characterized by an account that integrates these theories. Specifically, we suggest that environmental factors impact the pace at which children’s theories and valenced learning biases change with age, and consequently the rate at which their optimism declines. This account suggests that optimism should be conceptualized as an adaptive bias that signals the nature of one’s environment and leads to specific recommendations for future lines of enquiry.

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Fig. 1: Empirical evidence for children’s optimism bias.
Fig. 2: Three candidate mechanisms for why optimism declines with age.
Fig. 3: Effects of environment on developmental trajectories of declines in optimism with age.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank members of the Leonard Learning Lab, the Toronto Early Cognition Lab and J.A.L.’s writing group, as well as A. Mackey and T. Kushnir, for helpful comments on this manuscript. This research was supported by a Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship awarded to J.A.L.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Julia A. Leonard

  2. Wu Tsai Institute, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Julia A. Leonard

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jessica A. Sommerville

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Leonard, J.A., Sommerville, J.A. A unified account of why optimism declines in childhood. Nat Rev Psychol 4, 35–48 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00384-z

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