Abstract
The purpose of the present study was to examine the academic achievement of defensive pessimists, that is, students who recognize positive past experience but have low expectations for future outcomes, and strategic optimists, students who acknowledge generally positive past experiences and expect positive outcomes in the future, and also to examine the role of the cognitive strategies of defensive pessimism and strategic optimism in the test coping and academic achievement of junior high school students. The findings indicated that the defensive pessimists performed as well as the strategic optimists. Moreover, for the defensive pessimists, avoidant-thinking and optimistic-thinking coping were both negatively related to academic achievement. However, avoidant-thinking and optimistic-thinking coping were found not to be related to the academic achievement of the strategic optimists. The defensive pessimists who did not use either avoidant-thinking or optimistic-thinking coping subsequently performed significantly better academically than did those who used avoidant-thinking coping. In contrast, the opposite pattern emerged in strategic optimists. Strategic optimists who used avoidant-thinking coping subsequently performed significantly better on academic achievement than those who did not use that coping style.
