“It just starts to compound,” Pride said. “I personally believe that there is somewhat of a self-reinforcing cycle that goes on between the markets and the economy. I think it is actually typical that you would see a strong relationship…and I think it’s very symptomatic of that self-feeding cycle.”

He said his firm is also optimistic about the economy. Though he doesn’t expect a boom, he does expect improvement.

Tania Henderson of Side By Side Consulting, and a psychotherapist in the Denver area, also said it’s not surprising that the state of the market would have a profound effect on business optimism.

“When it comes to the Dow Jones, there are two particular factors at work: trustworthiness and familiarity,” she said in an email to Portfolio.com. So consider where you get your information about the Dow—places like the Wall Street Journal and NPR—deeply credible sources. And then there’s familiarity. The Dow Jones is reported on daily. Other statistics don’t get that kind of PR. Exposure means familiarity and comfort.

“When we add those two factors to a subject that is emotionally charged, like our pocketbooks, it is no wonder why small businesses are so swayed by the Dow,” she wrote.

But this time around, optimism isn’t going to be accompanied by ease. A survey of economists last week showed they expected a rocky road to recovery. The 49 economists expect the just-finished third quarter will have showed 3.1 percent GDP growth, and they expect slightly slower growth through the first half of 2010.

They don’t, though, expect the labor market to rebound quickly. They don’t see unemployment falling below 6 percent until 2013.

"Never before has business shed so many workers so fast, so many people failed to find work who are looking for work, and so many dropped out of the labor force as in the current circumstance," Allen Sinai at Decision Economics told the Wall Street Journal.

For small-business owners, what that could mean is fewer customers with less money and slower growth than the optimists expect in the next few months.

Larry Hyatt, owner of Hyatt Gun and Coin, a 50-year-old business in Charlotte, North Carolina, said that’s the kind of economy he’s operating in, a weak one.

“I’m more pessimistic now than I was a month ago,” he said. “The only improvement I’ve seen is verbal, from people far, far away.”

As for the market’s effect on his mood, he said, sure, it made him feel better to see the Dow rise.

“When I see it going it up, it makes me feel a little bit better,” Hyatt said. “But when I see it going up, I don’t have a clue why it’s going up.”