Insights from brain imaging could have implications for mental-health research

July 21, 2025 | 08:00pm

The optimistic brain: scans reveal thought patterns shared by positive thinkers

Insights from brain imaging could have implications for mental-health research

Activity in the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex shows similar patterns in optimistic people.Credit: Mark and Mary Stevens Neuroimaging and Informatics Institute/Science Photo Library

Optimistic people share patterns of brain activity, and make more of a distinction between positive and negative events than pessimists do, a brain-imaging study has found.

The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 21 July¹, could offer clues for researchers studying complex feelings such as empathy and loneliness, as well as depression and other mental-health conditions associated with negative thoughts.

“What if the common phrase ‘being on the same wavelength’ isn’t just a metaphor, but a neural reality?” says study co-author Kuniaki Yanagisawa, a social psychologist and neuroscientist at Kobe University in Japan. Previous research² has shown that people who have a positive mindset show similar responses in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), a part of the brain that is involved in thinking about the future and processing emotions. They also have similar personality traits, which suggests that a positive outlook leads to a shared way of interpreting experiences.

Yanagisawa and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in 87 participants while they imagined future events that were categorized as positive, neutral or negative. After their fMRI scans, participants completed a questionnaire designed to measure how optimistic they were.

Positive patterns

When they analysed patterns of brain activity in the MPFC, the researchers found that optimistic people seemed to have similar thought processes, whereas pessimistic people had more varying, idiosyncratic patterns.