Imagine that you’ve just submitted an application for something important to you: Perhaps it was a dream job, the perfect apartment, or an academic program you’re passionate about.
As you’re waiting to hear back, do you think over what a best-case outcome would be like? Or do you instead try to avoid thinking about it, so that you’re not disappointed if things don’t go your way?
According to psychologists, whether we tend to experience hope in scenarios like these can have important implications. And while some of us may be hesitant to hope—perhaps because we want to protect ourselves from future disappointment—hope has a range of benefits. Research has found that more hopeful people are healthier, as well as less anxious and depressed. Moreover, instead of being wishful thinking, hope seems to prepare us to take productive actions: Those who are more hopeful tend to cope with adversity in more resilient and adaptive ways.
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A new set of studies, published earlier this year in the journal Emotion, suggests that hope may have an additional benefit: Those who feel more hopeful tend to also see life as more meaningful.
In two studies, a total of over 900 participants reported on their positive emotions, hope, and meaning in life. The researchers used two ways of measuring hope: They asked people about their emotions (e.g., “I feel hopeful”), as well as their beliefs about whether it’s possible for them to bring about a good outcome (e.g., “I can think of many ways to reach my current goals”).
The researchers found that people who were more hopeful (as measured by both their emotions and beliefs) had a greater sense of meaning in life. They also found, in one of the studies, that the emotion of hope had a stronger link to meaning than people’s beliefs about whether they could attain a good outcome. In other words, even if we’re in a situation where we don’t see how to solve a problem, we can still find meaning if we feel hopeful.
These results couldn’t be accounted for by participants’ levels of positive emotions alone—in other words, hopeful participants weren’t reporting that life is more meaningful just because they feel happier overall. In fact, hope generally had a stronger link to meaning than positive emotions did.
As a follow-up study, the researchers looked at levels of hope and meaning in 301 college students who filled out surveys five times over a semester. The researchers found that a student’s feelings of hope on one survey helped predict how much meaning they would feel on the next survey, three weeks later. This offers more evidence that hope actually brings us a sense of meaning, rather than the other way around. And this wasn’t true for positive emotions, suggesting again that hope may be a stronger driver of meaning in life.
Becoming more hopeful
Is it possible to inspire a sense of hope and meaning in life?
The researchers conducted another study where 678 participants read one of two articles about climate change. One article was designed to make people feel hopeful, while the other suggested climate change was unavoidable.
Participants who read the hopeful article tended to report feeling more hope, and readers who felt more hopeful reported a greater overall sense of meaning in life. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, reading an inspiring news story didn’t directly inspire a sense of meaning—but it seemed to do so to the extent that it fostered hope.
Why didn’t the article directly boost meaning in life? The researchers point out that this study was conducted around the time of hurricane season, and this context might have made it harder for participants to believe a hopeful article about climate change. Moreover, explains Megan Edwards, a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University and lead author of the paper, hope is an existential emotion—so it might be harder to change someone’s levels of hope in a brief amount of time. Future research, she suggests, could look at how people cultivate hope in daily life—including in the aftermath of hardship.
While hope might be a tricky emotion to pin down in the research lab, it appears to have a variety of benefits. So, if you’re someone who tends to avoid getting your hopes up, is there a way to go about changing this?
Edwards tells Greater Good that a key strategy is to take time to notice what’s going well, whether that’s a feel-good story we find on social media or good news in our own lives. She also points out that, during times of adversity, it can be helpful to remind ourselves that the current situation isn’t permanent, and things can always change. Moreover, she explains, cultivating this mindset can help us start enacting the changes we need in order to make things better.
