Hope

Abstract

Hope is a type of emotion: in the account that dominates its psychology, a goal-directed cognitive set made of agency, the determination to reach goals, and pathways, the perceived ability to find routes to them. This article covers hope theory and its scales, the Herth Hope Index, the evidence that hope is distinct from optimism and from hopelessness, hope's prospective relations to depression, anxiety and posttraumatic stress and its cross-sectional relation to suicidal ideation, the meta-analyses of hope in school and at work, hope-enhancement interventions, and the health and orbitofrontal correlates of trait hope. The central dispute is whether hope is a distinct construct or a facet of a broader positive expectancy shared with optimism. Three interactive demos show how agency and pathways combine, how hope buffers hopelessness, and what hope interventions typically achieve.

Keywords: hope, hope theory, agency, pathways, hopelessness

Hope has been discussed in the humanities for as long as there have been humanities, and researched in psychology (Long et al., 2020). The research tradition took its shape from a definition. Hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and to motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways; the adult and child hope scales derive from that theory, and higher hope is consistently related to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment and psychotherapy (Snyder, 2002). The definition made hope measurable, and measurement made the rest of the literature possible: longitudinal tests against depression and anxiety, meta-analyses in classrooms and workplaces, controlled interventions, and a first look at the brain. It also raised the question that still organises the field, whether hope is a construct of its own or one face of a general positive expectancy that it shares with optimism.

What Hope Is

Three traditions define hope, and they overlap more than they compete. In hope theory, hope is a cognitive set that is composed of a reciprocally derived sense of successful agency, goal-directed determination, and pathways, planning of ways to meet goals (Snyder et al., 1991). In the nursing tradition, an abbreviated instrument developed for ill adults isolated three factors, temporality and future, positive readiness and expectancy, and interconnectedness (Herth, 1992). A further treatment of the nature and measurement of hope sits alongside both (Scioli et al., 2011). The traditions agree that hope is future-directed and goal-related; they differ on how much of it is cognition, how much emotion and how much relationship.

Hope also has an emotional dimension. Both hope and subjective well-being are multidimensional concepts comprising emotion, anticipation and affect, cognition, expectation and satisfaction, and to some degree motivation, and in a representative sample of the American population positive expectations were only weakly associated with all domains of subjective well-being whereas cognitive and emotional hope were most strongly related to it, which indicates that the more passive characteristics of positive expectations have less of an impact on subjective well-being than a more agentic hopeful disposition (Pleeging et al., 2021). MeSH files hope under emotions; the research literature treats it mostly as goal-directed thinking with an affective tone. Both are defensible, and the agency finding below is the reason the cognitive-motivational reading has carried the empirical work.

Hope Theory

Hope theory is a theory of motivation as much as of feeling. Agency is belief in one's capacity to initiate and sustain actions, pathways is belief in one's capacity to generate routes to reach goals, and the Hope Scale was developed and validated as a dispositional self-report measure of this cognitive set (Snyder et al., 1996). Hope Scale scores augmented the prediction of goal-related activities and coping strategies beyond other self-report measures, construct validational support was provided in regard to predicted goal-setting behaviours, and the hypothesized goal appraisal processes that accompany the various levels of hope were corroborated (Snyder et al., 1991). The theory was compared to theories of learned optimism, optimism, self-efficacy and self-esteem, processes that lessen hope in children and adults were reviewed, and, using the hope theory definition, no evidence was found for false hope (Snyder, 2002).

Figure 1

Hope Theory: Agency and Pathways Toward a Goal

Measuring Hope

The theory came with a family of instruments. The dispositional Hope Scale showed acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability, and its factor structure identified the agency and pathways components (Snyder et al., 1991). Four further studies developed a measure of state hope: the 6-item State Hope Scale is internally consistent, reflects the theorized agency and pathways components, shows concurrent and discriminant validity, and is responsive to events in the lives of people as evidenced by data gathered through both correlational and causal designs (Snyder et al., 1996). For children, agency thoughts reflect the perception that children can initiate and sustain action toward a desired goal and pathways thoughts reflect their perceived capability to produce routes to those goals; a six-item dispositional self-report index, the Children's Hope Scale, was introduced and validated for use with children ages 8-16, with internal consistency, relative stability over retesting, and convergent, discriminant and incremental validity (Snyder et al., 1997).

The nursing tradition built its own. The Herth Hope Index, a 12-item adapted version of the Herth Hope Scale, was tested with a convenience sample of 172 ill adults; the alpha coefficient was 0.97 with a 2-week test-retest reliability of 0.91, criterion-related validity was established by correlating the index with the parent scale (r = 0.92), the Existential Well-Being Scale (r = 0.84) and the Nowotny Hope Scale (r = 0.81), divergent validity with the Hopelessness Scale was established (r = -0.73), and three factors accounted for 41% of the total variance (Herth, 1992). The Hopelessness Scale it diverges from had been designed to quantify hopelessness in diverse samples of patients, showed a high degree of internal consistency and a relatively high correlation with clinical ratings of hopelessness, was sensitive to changes in the patient's state of depression over time, and yielded an affective, a motivational and a cognitive factor (Beck et al., 1974).

Table 1. Hope and hopelessness measures, as described in the cited abstracts.

Note. Each row lists only what the cited abstract reports (Snyder et al., 1991; Snyder et al., 1996; Snyder et al., 1997; Herth, 1992; Beck et al., 1974). The scales differ in population and purpose, so the rows are not a single comparison.

Hope, Optimism and Hopelessness

Whether hope is its own construct is the field's standing question. Contemporary theories of hope and optimism provide two explanations for how positive expectancies can shape human behaviour: Scheier and Carver's theory of optimism focuses on generalized expectations of positive outcomes, whereas Snyder's hope theory focuses on how evaluations of personal agency can facilitate goal attainment, and some have questioned whether the constructs are truly distinct (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009). Confirmatory factor analysis and a bootstrapped structural equation model indicated that hope and optimism are distinct latent constructs that each uniquely predict a moderate proportion of variance of the components of well-being (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009). A synthesized model goes the other way, conceptualising hope and optimism as facets of an overarching trait called goal attitude: in 345 students the model showed acceptable fit, and in the 312 who completed the course hope uniquely influenced students' grade expectancies whereas optimism did not, grade expectancies influenced academic performance, and the shared aspect of hope and optimism, goal attitude, had a direct influence on academic performance (Rand, 2009). The two constructs have also been examined together meta-analytically (Alarcon et al., 2013) and distinguished from one another and from related affective states (Bruininks & Malle, 2005).

Hopelessness is the other boundary. A community sample of 2,106 participants in a population-based household survey showed that a measurement model with separate, correlated second-order factors of hope and hopelessness provided a good fit to the data and was significantly better than that of the model collapsing hope and hopelessness into a single second-order factor, so hope and hopelessness are two distinct but correlated constructs (Huen et al., 2015). Hopelessness has its own theory of depression, hopelessness depression, proposed as a theory-based subtype; its authors noted the possibility that future work may not corroborate the subtype and that the etiological chain featured in the hopelessness theory may instead be one of many pathways to a final common outcome of depression, in which case it would be more compelling to speak of a hopelessness cause, as opposed to a hopelessness subtype, of depression (Abramson et al., 1989). That theory descends from the critique and reformulation of learned helplessness in humans (Abramson et al., 1978), which is why hope research and depression research share so much vocabulary.

Hope and Mental Health

The longitudinal evidence favours one component over the other. In 522 college students who completed self-report measures of hope, depression and anxiety at three time points with 1-month delays, cross-lagged panel models showed statistically significant negative effects for the Agency component of hope on later depression but no unique effect of the Pathways component, Agency showed a statistically significant negative effect on later anxiety while Pathways again had no significant influence, and in both cases neither depression nor anxiety demonstrated any longitudinal effects on either component of hope (Arnau et al., 2007). Trauma gives a parallel picture. Aggregated results from 154 studies indicated that positive expectancies were associated with lower levels of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms, a relationship stronger for coping-specific self-efficacy (k = 38, r = -.49) and hope (k = 20, r = -.34) compared with general self-efficacy (k = 45, r = -.25) and optimism (k = 59, r = -.29) in cross-sectional studies, with results consistent in prospective studies and no moderation of the cross-sectional relationships by age or gender (Gallagher et al., 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, in 822 American adults followed for approximately one month, higher hope was associated with greater well-being and perceived emotional control as well as lower anxiety and perceived stress, with an indirect effect of hope on all outcomes via perceived emotional control (Gallagher et al., 2021).

Hope also buffers the most dangerous outcome. In the household survey of 2,106 participants, negative binomial regression showed that hope and hopelessness interacted such that the effect of hopelessness on suicidal ideation was lower in individuals with higher hope than in individuals with lower hope, so that hope can act as a resilience factor that buffers the impact of hopelessness on suicidal ideation, and inducing hope may be a promising avenue for suicide prevention (Huen et al., 2015).

Hope in School and at Work

Hope earns its keep in applied settings. Higher hope is consistently related to better outcomes in academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment and psychotherapy (Snyder, 2002). In the goal-attitude study, hope uniquely influenced students' grade expectancies whereas optimism did not, and grade expectancies in turn influenced academic performance, although neither hope nor optimism had a unique, direct influence on performance (Rand, 2009). The association between hope and academic-related outcomes has since been meta-analysed (Marques et al., 2017). At work, a systematic review and meta-analysis of 133 effect sizes across 45 primary studies based on 11,139 employees found that the overall corrected mean effect sizes between hope and work performance and employee well-being were positive and statistically significant, with gender and study location as significant moderators, women and US-based studies having stronger hope to work outcomes effects (Reichard et al., 2013).

Raising Hope

If hope is a cognitive set, it should be teachable. Hope therapy was piloted in a community sample (Cheavens et al., 2006), and a single-session goal-pursuit intervention for college students tested whether hope can be changed in 90 minutes (Feldman & Dreher, 2012). The pooled answer is sober. A meta-analysis of 27 studies involving 2,154 participants showed significant, but small, effect sizes for hopefulness and life satisfaction and no overall relationship between hope enhancement strategies and decreased psychological distress; moderation tests indicated greater effect sizes for studies involving brief interventions, conducted in laboratory settings and administered to students or individuals recruited from the community, and the results also suggested publication bias (Weis & Speridakos, 2011). The authors concluded that, given only modest evidence for the ability of hope enhancement strategies to increase hopefulness or life satisfaction and no consistent evidence that they alleviate psychological distress, traditional psychotherapeutic interventions or other effective positive psychological constructs such as gratitude, optimism and mindfulness might best be targeted in applied settings (Weis & Speridakos, 2011). Hope, on this evidence, is easier to measure than to move.

Hope, Health and the Brain

The population evidence is broad. In the Health and Retirement Study (N = 12,998, mean age 66), analysed with an outcome-wide approach, Bonferroni correction and controls for sociodemographic characteristics, personality factors and prior values of hope and of all outcomes, a greater sense of hope was associated with better physical health and health behaviour outcomes on some indicators, including reduced risk of all-cause mortality, fewer chronic conditions, lower risk of cancer and fewer sleep problems, with higher psychological well-being, lower psychological distress and better social well-being (Long et al., 2020). The brain evidence is a first step. In 231 high school students scanned with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, whole-brain correlation analyses revealed that higher trait hope was related to lower fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations in the bilateral medial orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in reward-related processing, motivation production, problem solving and goal-directed behaviours, and mediation analyses suggested that trait hope acted as a mediator in the association between medial orbitofrontal spontaneous activity and anxiety, results that persisted after adjusting for positive and negative affect (Wang et al., 2017). A single resting-state study cannot localise hope; what it shows is that a trait defined by goal-directed thinking relates to a region implicated in goal-directed behaviour.

Worked Example

The meta-analytic numbers reward a few lines of arithmetic. The hope-at-work meta-analysis pooled 133 effect sizes across 45 primary studies based on 11,139 employees (Reichard et al., 2013), so the average primary study contributed about three effect sizes (133 / 45 = 2.96) and about 248 employees (11,139 / 45 = 247.5). The intervention meta-analysis pooled 27 studies involving 2,154 participants (Weis & Speridakos, 2011), about 80 per study (2,154 / 27 = 79.8), under a third of the work-study average. In the trauma meta-analysis the hope correlation was r = -.34 across 20 studies and the optimism correlation r = -.29 across 59 (Gallagher et al., 2020): squared, hope accounts for about 11.6% of the variance in symptoms (0.34 x 0.34 = 0.1156) and optimism about 8.4% (0.29 x 0.29 = 0.0841), a difference of about three percentage points resting on three times as many optimism studies as hope studies (59 / 20 = 2.95). The largest single sample in the article, the 12,998 older adults of the Health and Retirement Study (Long et al., 2020), is about 56 times the imaging sample of 231 students (Wang et al., 2017) (12,998 / 231 = 56.3). The arithmetic does not change any conclusion; it shows which conclusions stand on how many people.

Discussion

First, the two-component structure has done real work, and the work has not fallen evenly on the components. Hope is a cognitive set of agency and pathways (Snyder et al., 1991), but over one-month intervals it was the Agency component that predicted lower later depression and anxiety while Pathways had no unique effect (Arnau et al., 2007), and more agentic hope related more strongly to subjective well-being than passive positive expectation did (Pleeging et al., 2021). The asymmetry has its own line of work: a re-examination over four studies using different agency and pathways variables, methods and cultures found that hope as understood by the layperson is only associated with agency thinking and not with pathways thinking, with implications for Snyder's model that the authors discuss (Tong et al., 2010). Whether pathways thinking matters for other outcomes, or only in combination with agency, is a question the component scores make answerable.

Second, the distinctness debate has two defensible answers. Hope and optimism are distinct latent constructs that each uniquely predict well-being (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009); they also fit as facets of an overarching goal attitude whose shared aspect, rather than either construct alone, directly influenced academic performance (Rand, 2009). The results are compatible: a construct can be distinct at the level of latent factors and still share a higher-order factor with its neighbour. What the debate decides is which level a given prediction should be made at.

Third, the applied record is uneven. The correlational and prospective evidence is consistent in direction, from suicidal ideation (Huen et al., 2015) to posttraumatic stress (Gallagher et al., 2020) to mortality and chronic conditions in older adults (Long et al., 2020). The interventional evidence is small: significant but small effects on hopefulness and life satisfaction, none on distress, and signs of publication bias (Weis & Speridakos, 2011). A construct that predicts outcomes it cannot yet be used to change is a construct whose causal role remains to be shown.

Current Directions

The field's recent work is epidemiological, mechanistic and neural. An outcome-wide longitudinal design identified several potentially modifiable factors that may lead to increased hope, with results that may have important population-level implications for increasing hope and improving the physical, psychological and social well-being of the growing older adult population (Long et al., 2020). In mechanism, perceived emotional control, a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor, carried an indirect effect of hope on anxiety, stress and well-being during the pandemic (Gallagher et al., 2021), and future research is to identify moderators and examine positive expectancies as mechanisms of change in therapy (Gallagher et al., 2020). In measurement, the finding that the more passive characteristics of positive expectations have less of an impact on subjective well-being than a more agentic hopeful disposition (Pleeging et al., 2021) argues for scoring the components separately. The resting-state study provides the first evidence for functional brain substrates underlying trait hope (Wang et al., 2017), and the suicide-prevention literature has been handed a testable proposal: inducing hope in people may be a promising avenue for suicide prevention (Huen et al., 2015).

Common Misconceptions

“Hope is just optimism by another name.”

Optimism theory focuses on generalized expectations of positive outcomes whereas hope theory focuses on how evaluations of personal agency can facilitate goal attainment, and the two are distinct latent constructs that each uniquely predict well-being (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009); in students, hope uniquely influenced grade expectancies whereas optimism did not (Rand, 2009).

“Hope is simply the absence of hopelessness.”

A model with separate, correlated factors of hope and hopelessness fit significantly better than one collapsing them into a single factor, and hope moderated the effect of hopelessness on suicidal ideation (Huen et al., 2015); the Herth Hope Index correlates with the Hopelessness Scale at r = -0.73, strongly but not perfectly (Herth, 1992).

“Hope is wishful thinking.”

In hope theory, hope is the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals and to motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways, and using that definition no evidence was found for false hope (Snyder, 2002); Hope Scale scores predicted goal-related activities and coping strategies beyond other measures (Snyder et al., 1991).

“Hope can be installed in a workshop.”

Across 27 studies, hope enhancement strategies showed significant but small effects on hopefulness and life satisfaction, no overall relationship with decreased psychological distress, and signs of publication bias (Weis & Speridakos, 2011).

Glossary

Agency thinking.

The goal-directed determination component of hope, the belief in one's capacity to initiate and sustain actions toward goals; the component that predicted lower later depression and anxiety.

Children's Hope Scale.

A six-item dispositional self-report index of agency and pathways thinking validated for children aged 8 to 16.

Cross-lagged panel model.

A longitudinal design in which each variable at one time predicts the others at the next; used to show that agency predicted later depression and anxiety but not the reverse.

Goal attitude.

The overarching trait of which hope and optimism are conceptualised as facets in the synthesized model; its shared aspect directly influenced academic performance.

Herth Hope Index.

A 12-item abbreviated version of the Herth Hope Scale for adults in clinical settings, with factors of temporality and future, positive readiness and expectancy, and interconnectedness.

Hope Scale.

The dispositional self-report measure of hope theory's agency and pathways components, developed in 1991.

Hope theory.

Snyder's account on which hope is the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals and to motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways.

Hope therapy.

A hope-theory-based intervention piloted in a community sample; one of the hope enhancement strategies whose pooled effects are small.

Hopelessness Scale.

Beck's self-report scale quantifying hopelessness in patient samples, with affective, motivational and cognitive factors.

Hopelessness theory of depression.

The theory proposing hopelessness depression as a theory-based subtype of depression whose etiological chain ends in hopelessness; its authors noted that the chain may instead prove to be one of many pathways to depression, a hopelessness cause rather than a subtype.

Medial orbitofrontal cortex.

A region involved in reward-related processing, motivation and goal-directed behaviour whose spontaneous resting activity related to trait hope.

Outcome-wide approach.

A longitudinal design relating one exposure, here hope, to a wide range of later outcomes with correction for multiple testing.

Pathways thinking.

The planning component of hope, the belief in one's capacity to generate routes to goals; it showed no unique longitudinal effect on depression or anxiety.

Positive expectancies.

The family of constructs, hope, optimism and self-efficacy, that predict lower posttraumatic stress symptoms and post-trauma resilience.

State Hope Scale.

A 6-item measure of ongoing goal-directed thinking that is responsive to events in people's lives.

Key Researchers

Lyn Y. Abramson

. Professor Emerita of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; co-authored the hopelessness theory of depression, which places hopelessness in the causal chain of a proposed subtype of depression. Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Aaron T. Beck

. Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania (1921-2021); founded cognitive therapy and, with colleagues, built the Hopelessness Scale that made hopelessness measurable. Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Jennifer S. Cheavens

. Professor of Clinical Psychology at The Ohio State University; led the pilot trial of hope therapy in a community sample and studies hope-based treatment and emotion regulation. ORCID - Faculty Page

David B. Feldman

. Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University; co-developed hope therapy and tested whether a single 90-minute goal-pursuit session can change hope in college students. Faculty Page - Wikipedia

Matthew W. Gallagher

. Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Houston; separated hope from optimism as predictors of mental health, meta-analysed hope's protection against posttraumatic stress, and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Hope. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar

Shane J. Lopez

. Senior Scientist in Residence at Gallup and formerly professor at the University of Kansas (1970-2016); carried hope theory into schools and workplaces through meta-analyses of hope and academic outcomes and of hope at work. Wikipedia

Kevin L. Rand

. Associate Professor of Psychology at Indiana University Indianapolis; proposed the goal-attitude model on which hope and optimism are facets of one trait, and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Hope. ORCID

C. R. Snyder

. M. Erik Wright Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Kansas (1944-2006); originated hope theory and built the Adult, State and Children's Hope Scales. Wikipedia

Frequently Asked Questions

What is hope in psychology?

In hope theory, hope is defined as the perceived capability to derive pathways to desired goals, and to motivate oneself via agency thinking to use those pathways (Snyder, 2002); the original scale paper defines it as a cognitive set composed of a reciprocally derived sense of successful agency and pathways (Snyder et al., 1991).

How is hope different from optimism?

Optimism theory focuses on generalized expectations of positive outcomes whereas hope theory focuses on how evaluations of personal agency can facilitate goal attainment, and the two are distinct latent constructs that each uniquely predict well-being (Gallagher & Lopez, 2009); a rival model treats them as facets of a single goal attitude (Rand, 2009).

How is hope measured?

By the dispositional Hope Scale with its agency and pathways factors (Snyder et al., 1991), the 6-item State Hope Scale (Snyder et al., 1996), the Children's Hope Scale for ages 8-16 (Snyder et al., 1997) and, in clinical settings, the 12-item Herth Hope Index (Herth, 1992).

Does hope protect against depression and anxiety?

In 522 students measured three times at monthly intervals, the Agency component of hope had statistically significant negative effects on later depression and anxiety, Pathways had no unique effect, and neither symptom predicted later hope (Arnau et al., 2007).

Does hope reduce suicide risk?

In a household survey of 2,106 people, the effect of hopelessness on suicidal ideation was lower in individuals with higher hope than in individuals with lower hope, so hope can act as a resilience factor, and inducing hope may be a promising avenue for suicide prevention (Huen et al., 2015).

Does hope matter at work?

A meta-analysis of 133 effect sizes across 45 studies and 11,139 employees found positive and statistically significant corrected mean effect sizes between hope and both work performance and employee well-being, with stronger effects for women and in US-based studies (Reichard et al., 2013).

Can hope be increased?

Across 27 studies and 2,154 participants, hope enhancement strategies showed significant but small effects on hopefulness and life satisfaction and no overall relationship with decreased psychological distress, with larger effects for brief interventions in laboratory settings and signs of publication bias (Weis & Speridakos, 2011).

Is hope related to health and the brain?

In 12,998 older adults, a greater sense of hope was associated with reduced risk of all-cause mortality, fewer chronic conditions, lower risk of cancer and fewer sleep problems, as well as higher psychological well-being (Long et al., 2020); in 231 students, higher trait hope was related to lower spontaneous activity in the bilateral medial orbitofrontal cortex, and hope mediated the association between that activity and anxiety (Wang et al., 2017).

References