Introduction: The (overlooked) virtues of "unvirtuous" attitudes and behavior: reconsidering negativity, complaining, pessimism, and "false" hope.

The attitudes and behaviors examined in this special section-namely, negativity, complaining, pessimism, and "false" hope-have not typically been viewed as virtuous either in popular culture or in professional psychology. In reconsidering these attitudes and behaviors, each of the authors demonstrates how there may actually be virtue, or at least something positive, in what has typically been cast in a negative light. Copyright 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.