Chronic Pessimism as Negative-Expectation Wrong Attractor: The Explanatory Style Trap, Confirmation Bias Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Optimism

Chronic pessimism — the systematic negative-expectation style that interprets negative events as permanent, pervasive, and personal — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CP in the landscape of calibrated optimism. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated optimism: the capacity to form expectations proportionate to evidence, with a mild positive bias that sustains motivated engagement without systematic reality-distortion.

W_CP is distinguished from depression, from appropriate negative expectation given genuine adversity, and from defensive pessimism. Using Seligman's learned optimism framework, the 3-P explanatory style (permanent, pervasive, personal) characterizes basin depth. The confirmation bias engine sustains W_CP: chronic pessimists selectively attend to negative outcomes, interpret ambiguous events negatively, and discount positive outcomes, deepening the basin at each environmental pass.

Nine formal propositions characterize the explanatory style as basin coordinates, the confirmation bias feedback loop, genetic and adversity contributions to basin depth, learned helplessness as substrate, physiological signature including HPA dysregulation and immune suppression, and return paths through the ABCDE model, cognitive restructuring, gratitude practices, and behavioral activation.