552 v. AFFECTI vE PROCESSES
deeply embedded in the self, if those values 
create too much conflict and distress in their 
lives. Remaining stuck in the past instead of 
moving on has been found to create prob -
lems for people who have experienced a vari -
ety of life traumas (Holman & Silver, 1998).
Giving up is most functional and adap -
tive, though, when it leads to taking up 
other goals,  whether these are substitutes 
for the lost goal or simply new goals in a dif -
ferent domain. By facilitating the pursuit of 
alternative goals, giving up a particular goal 
can potentially increase the opportunity to 
reengage in something else and move ahead 
again (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Scheier & 
Carver, 2001; Wrosch & Scheier, 2020). In 
such cases, giving up subserves the broader 
return of the person to engagement with 
life (Mens, Wrosch, et al., 2015; Wrosch & 
Scheier, 2020; Wrosch et al., 2013). People 
need multiple paths to the values that extend 
deeply into the sense of self. If one path is 
barricaded, people need to be able to jump 
to another one.
There is suggestive evidence that there are 
age differences in the role disengagement 
plays in overall well-being. In particular, 
the evidence suggests that it is particularly 
problematic for older people to have diffi -
culties disengaging (Mens, Wrosch, et al., 
2015; Wrosch & Scheier, 2020). Whether 
this finding is a specific manifestation of 
the psychological experience of aging more 
generally will likely be a subject for future 
research.
It seems likely that substituting a new path 
for an obstructed one is made easier by hav -
ing clarity about one’s goals at the abstract 
level. For example, if a person who strongly 
values a sense of connectedness in a close 
marriage loses his or her spouse, the sense 
of connection can be recreated in different 
ways. A person in this situation who under -
stands that his or her core desire is to expe -
rience closeness  can more readily recognize 
that there are many ways to do this than can 
someone who is less clear about the nature 
of the higher-  level goal. Similarly, it seems 
likely that a person who already recognizes 
the multiple paths that exist to a given goal 
will be better prepared to make such shifts, 
as necessary.
In any case, it seems apparent that the 
ability to shift to a new goal, or a new path to a continuing goal, is an important part 
of remaining goal-  engaged. What happens if 
there is no alternative to take up? No shift 
occurs, because there is nothing to which 
one can shift. This is the worst situation, 
when nothing is there to take the place of 
what is seen as unattainable (cf. Moskowitz, 
Folkman, Collette, & Vittinghoff, 1996). 
Commitment to the unattainable means 
distress. Waning commitment in this sort of 
situation means emptiness.
Coping Research Revealing 
Self-Regulatory  Principles:  
The Case of Optimism
An important theme in our discussion of 
self- regulatory models was that expectations 
play a pivotal role in people’s responses to 
adversity. When impediments are encoun -
tered (and stress commences), what hap -
pens depends on whether the person feels 
the obstacles can be overcome, the problems 
solved or circumvented. When people ex -
pect to succeed (given the opportunity for 
further effort), they keep trying, and even 
try harder. When people see success as being 
out of reach, they withdraw effort, even give 
up completely the attempt to reach the goal.
Optimism, Pessimism, and Coping
This reasoning has also been examined in 
research on an individual-  difference vari -
able that influences the ways people cope. It 
follows from our emphasis on expectancies 
as an influence on self-  regulation that the 
classes of coping responses outlined earlier 
should occur in different proportions as a 
function of people’s expectancies. There is 
considerable evidence that this is so, and 
we describe a little of it here, focusing on 
research in which expectancies were opera -
tionalized in terms of generalized optimism 
versus pessimism. This is by no means an ex -
haustive review of these studies, but rather 
an attempt to illustrate the broader themes 
(for broader treatment, see, e.g., Carver & 
Connor-  Smith, 2010; Carver & Scheier, 
2017; Segerstrom, Carver, & Scheier, 2017).
Differences in coping responses that are 
used by optimists and pessimists have been 
found in a substantial number of studies 