The Relationship of Cognitive Strategies to Identity and Self-Acceptance

In many studies, optimists are considered as adaptive and pessimists are considered as maladaptive. However, the Defensive Pessimist, who achieve success by perceiving their past performance affirmatively, as well as thinking in a “bad way” when consider their future, has become known. The present study was designed to examine the relationship of cognitive strategy adoption orientation (Defensive Pessimism, Realistic Pessimism, Strategic Optimism, control group) to identity and self-acceptance. A survey was conducted in October, 2020. Subjects, 225 Japanese university students (84 male, 141 female) in Tohoku area, are asked to response to an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. Excluding missing data, answers of 210 of the subjects (84 male, 126 female, 20.63 ± 1.67 years old in average) were analyzed. A K-means cluster analysis was performed, in order to sort the subjects into four target strategy groups, by the scores of subfactors of the JDPI factors which are "pessimism," "past performance," "positive contemplation," and "effort". Next, a one-way ANOVA test was conducted with the JDPI cluster group as the independent variable, the total score of the Multidimensional Ego Identity Scale, along with scores of the four subfactors ("self-sameness, continuity", "self-identity", "interpersonal identity"", "psychological identity"), total score of the Self-Acceptance scale ("lifestyle", "personality", "home", "school", "physical ability"), and score of Active Class Attitude Scale as dependent variables. As a result, the Strategic Optimist group report higher level of psychological self-identity and self-acceptance than other groups. On the contrary, the Defensive Pessimist group had lower level of psychological self-identity than other groups, and showed higher level of self-acceptance than the Realistic Pessimism group. Results suggest that the cognitive strategy adoption orientation is related to identity and self-acceptance.