Which optimism questionnaire is this?

It is the 10-item Optimism scale from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), which is in the public domain and free to use for any purpose. It is not the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R). The LOT-R is distributed by its authors for research and teaching only, so we do not use it here; the IPIP scale measures the same construct and reports Alpha = .86.

Is being pessimistic a bad result?

No. The scale reports a leaning, not a defect. Defensive pessimism is a documented strategy that protects people from disappointment and often produces better preparation, and plenty of accurate risk assessment comes from the lower bands. What the research associates with cost is not caution itself but a low mood baseline that stops being situational.

Why do two questions both ask about feeling blue?

Because they are an intentional reverse-keyed pair from the source scale: one asks whether you seldom feel blue and the other whether you often do. Scales include pairs like this so that answering everything the same way produces an inconsistent rather than an extreme result. It is not a duplicated question.

Dispositional optimism is measured as a stable leaning, but this is a self-report about how you see yourself right now, and a rough month or a good one can move it. Retaking it after a real change in circumstances is more informative than retaking it the next day.

Is this a mental health assessment?

No. It is a self-reflection instrument about outlook, not a screening or diagnostic tool for depression or any other condition, and no result here identifies a disorder. If low mood is persistent rather than tied to a situation, that is a question for a professional rather than for a 10-item questionnaire.

PersonalityResearch-grade· IPIP Optimism scale (10 items, Alpha = .86)

Public-domain IPIP items — not the LOT-R (Life Orientation Test-Revised), which its authors license for research and teaching only.

Are You an Optimist or a Pessimist? Free 10-Question Test

Free 10-question optimism test using the public-domain IPIP dispositional optimism scale. Find out in 1 minute whether your default outlook leans optimistic or pessimistic, with a five-band score and two subscales.

10 questions1 min

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The basics

What is the Optimism & Pessimism Test?

Dispositional optimism is the general expectation that good things will happen more often than bad ones. It is not the same as being cheerful or thinking positively on demand: it is a stable leaning in how you read an uncertain future, and it tends to hold steady across situations rather than moving with your day.

Keep reading

This test uses the 10-item Optimism scale from the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), a public-domain item set built to measure the same construct as Scheier, Carver and Bridges' work on dispositional optimism. It reports an internal consistency of Alpha = .86. Six of the ten items are reverse-keyed, so agreeing with every statement does not push the score in one direction.

Your result is a five-band score from Braced for the Worst through to Strongly Optimistic, plus two subscales that split the construct: Positive Outlook, which is what you expect to happen, and Emotional Steadiness, which is the mood baseline underneath that expectation. The gap between the two is often the more interesting number, because steady-but-not-hopeful and hopeful-but-not-steady are different profiles that can land in the same band.

Closely related

What you get

What You'll Discover

Which of the five outlook bands your answers place you in

Your Positive Outlook subscale, how strongly you expect things to go well

Your Emotional Steadiness subscale, how settled your baseline mood is

The gap between the two, which tells you which half of the score is doing the work

What the optimism research suggests is worth practising from where you currently sit

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