Optimists think alike: Brain scans reveal shared visions of the future

By Priyanjana Pramanik, MSc.Reviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc.Jul 22 2025

New brain imaging research reveals that optimistic people not only see the future more brightly, but their brains also process future events in strikingly similar ways, unlocking the science behind optimism’s social and emotional power.

Study: Optimistic people are all alike: Shared neural representations supporting episodic future thinking among optimistic individuals. Image Credit: saepul_bahri / Shutterstock

In a recent article published in the journal PNAS, researchers investigated how optimism shapes the brain's representation of imagined future events. They found that optimistic individuals exhibited similar brain activity patterns while imagining future events, especially when differentiating between positive and negative scenarios. Conversely, less optimistic individuals displayed idiosyncratic and varied brain responses.

Background

Optimism, the tendency to expect positive future outcomes, is a powerful psychological trait associated with enhanced emotional well-being, reduced stress, and improved physical and mental health. Optimists not only imagine positive events more vividly but also treat them as more immediate and likely. Despite growing evidence of its benefits, little is known about how optimism shapes the brain's representation of imagined future scenarios, a process known as episodic future thinking.

Prior studies suggest that individuals with positive traits, such as strong social ties, exhibit similar brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a region involved in self-referential and future-oriented thought. Drawing on the Anna Karenina principle, which posits that positive outcomes are more similar than negative ones, the researchers hypothesized that optimistic individuals would exhibit more convergent MPFC activity, while less optimistic individuals would have more diverse neural responses.

About the Study

To test their hypothesis, researchers conducted two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies where participants imagined positive, neutral, and negative future events for themselves or their partners. The first study also included death-related scenarios, but these were excluded from the second study to create a more balanced experimental design.

The researchers employed intersubject representational similarity analysis to assess the similarity between participants' brain patterns and determine whether this relationship was related to their levels of optimism. A second method, individual differences multidimensional scaling, helped map how optimism influenced emotional differentiation in brain activity. Together, these approaches aimed to uncover the neural basis of optimism-driven future thinking.

The study involved two groups of married, right-handed adults without neurological or psychiatric conditions. The first group consisted of 37 participants, and the second group consisted of 50. All participants completed a test to measure their level of optimism. The second group of participants also provided demographic information and completed intelligence tests.

During the fMRI session, participants imagined detailed future scenarios happening either to themselves or their partners, based on written prompts describing positive, neutral, negative, and (in the first study only) death-related events. Each event appeared for ten seconds, and participants were instructed to vividly imagine the scenario that followed. The trials were randomized, and events were shown in both the self and partner conditions. A surprise memory test after scanning confirmed participants had paid close attention.

Brain scans were collected using an MRI scanner. The researchers focused on brain areas involved in future thinking, mainly within the default mode network (DMN). Two main analyses were employed: intersubject representational similarity analysis, to examine the degree of similarity between participants' brain responses, and individual differences multidimensional scaling, to identify the underlying structure of brain representations and how optimism influenced individual differences in processing emotional events.

Key Findings

The study found that individuals with more optimistic attitudes showed more similar brain activity patterns in the MPFC when imagining future events, while those with less optimistic attitudes displayed more varied neural responses. This pattern was evident across two fMRI studies, which used intersubject representational similarity analysis and were visualized through multidimensional scaling. The analysis revealed that highly optimistic participants clustered together in brain activity space. A strong negative correlation between optimism scores and distance from the most densely clustered region confirmed that greater optimism was associated with greater neural similarity.

Further analyses compared two models: a general similarity model and the Anna Karenina model, which predicted convergence only among optimistic individuals. The Anna Karenina model provided a more comprehensive explanation of neural similarity in the MPFC and other brain regions involved in future thinking. These effects were strongest for self-referential thinking, where participants imagined events happening to themselves, but weaker for partner-referential scenarios. Additional analyses confirmed that these patterns were not simply due to differences in overall brain activity levels but reflected multivariate patterns of neural representation.

Using a second method, the researchers found that optimistic individuals showed greater weights along the emotional dimension, indicating that positive events were represented as more neurally distinct from negative events in their brain activity patterns.

Conclusions

This study found that individuals with optimistic attitudes exhibit similar brain activity patterns in the MPFC when imagining future events, whereas less optimistic individuals display more varied neural responses. The neural data suggested that optimistic individuals represented positive and negative future events as more distinct from one another. These effects were consistent across two studies, using both methods, and offered robust support for the "neural convergence of optimism" hypothesis.

The use of both methods enabled the researchers not only to assess neural similarity but also to uncover the emotional and referential dimensions that shape cognitive representations. The relationship between optimism and emphasis on self versus partner differentiation was inconsistent across studies and requires further investigation.

The authors note that these findings may have implications for understanding how optimism influences social relationships, as shared neural processing patterns could contribute to better social connections, though this connection requires further research.

A key limitation was the weaker effect in partner-related scenarios, possibly due to design constraints. Overall, the study demonstrates that optimism shapes neural representations of emotional content during future thinking.