It remains meaningful to distinguish optimism from pessimism: Reply to VanderWeele and Kubzansky (2021).

VanderWeele and Kubzansky (2021) provide a commentary on Scheier et al. (2021), in which they introduce the distinction between what they term comparative and absolute optimism. We believe that more conceptual and empirical work is needed before a full understanding of the meaning and implications of the terms can be known. In contrast, the construal of optimism and pessimism as separate but related dimensions is founded on decades of research. Moreover, as shown in Scheier et al. (2021), the absence of pessimism is a better predictor of physical health outcomes than is the presence of optimism, which in turn has implications for how interventions might be devised. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).