Assessing Positive Orientation With the Implicit Association Test

Abstract. Positive orientation (PO) is a basic predisposition that consists in a positive outlook toward oneself, one’s life, and one’s future, which is associated to many desirable outcomes connected to health and to the general quality of life. We performed a lexical study for identifying a set of markers of PO, developed an Implicit Association Test (the PO-IAT), and investigated its psychometric properties. The PO-IAT proved to be a reliable measure with a clear pattern of convergent validity, both with respect to self-report scales connected to PO and with respect to an indirect measure of self-esteem. A secondary aim of our studies was to validate a new brief adjective scale to assess PO, the POAS. Our results show that both the PO-IAT and the self-reported PO predict the frequency of depressive symptoms and of self-perceived intelligence.