This study investigated the relation between positive affect and college success for undergraduate students matriculating at 21 colleges and universities in the United States.
Positive affect — cheerfulness — was positively related to students’ self-rated academic abilities, self-predicted likelihoods of various college outcomes, self-stated major and academic-degree intentions, and self-reported subjective college outcomes, but negatively related to most objective college-success variables (e.g., cumulative college grade-point average) recorded by the institution of matriculation, and not related to objective college outcomes reported by the student.
Positive affect was thus associated with “positive illusions” about college-success variables.
References:
Positive Affect and College Success. Journal of Happiness Studies - SpringerLink Journal, 2010.
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