When the glass is half full: early life experiences and adult optimism in 22 countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Little is known about early-life experiences that may lead to higher optimism levels in adulthood. Using data from 202,898 adults in 22 countries, we evaluated childhood candidate antecedents of optimism. We examined the associations between retrospectively reported childhood experiences and adult optimism levels in each country separately, and cross-nationally by pooling results across countries. Our pooled results suggest that higher adult optimism levels were associated with childhood experiences of having positive relationships with both parents, higher subjective financial status, better childhood self-rated health, frequent religious service attendance, an earlier year of birth, and being female. Conversely, lower adult optimism was associated with childhood experiences of parental divorce, abuse, financial hardship, and feeling like an outsider in the family. However, country-specific analyses showed substantial between-country variations in these associations, suggesting diverse societal influences. This study provides valuable insights into the association between early-life experiences and adult optimism levels across national contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".