Hope and mental health

DATE: 1950s forward

TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Cognition; emotion; motivation

Hope represents people setting goals, becoming aware of how to achieve them, and developing sufficient motivation to pursue them. Hope theories are based on emotion, cognition, or both. Mental health professionals use various scales to measure hope. The presence or lack of hope affects physical and emotional health.

Introduction

For centuries, people have contemplated the meaning of hope. Because hope is an abstract idea, definitions have varied according to diverse factors, including cultural, spiritual, and psychological needs to secure what people believe hope represents. The essence of hope frequently reflects wishes for accomplishments or objects that fulfill people or help them achieve behaviors compatible with societal demands. Secular and religious literature has depicted hope mostly with positive attributes, although some portrayals, such as the Pandora myth, hint of hope’s ambiguities. Hope is often equated with resilience, while hopelessness is associated with despair. Until the mid-twentieth century, many psychology researchers resisted studying hope scientifically because they considered it difficult to define and quantify.

Hope Theories

In 1959, Karl Menninger spoke about the need for psychiatrists to study and incorporate hope in therapy during his presidential presentation at an American Psychiatric Association meeting. Jerome Frank emphasized the importance of hope for effective in a 1968 International Journal of Psychiatry article. Hope theory research, representing positive psychology, emerged throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. Erik H. Erikson hypothesized that hope, which he said started forming at birth, was essential for the development of cognition. Ezra Stotland wrote The Psychology of Hope (1969), exploring his premise that people’s expectations to meet valued goals influenced their experiences with hope.

By the 1980s, Sara Staats had stated that hope involved both emotion and cognition. At the University of Kansas, C. R. Snyder began developing a hope theory to assist his patients in recognizing ways to pursue their goals. In the 1990s, he outlined three components of hope. First, people identify goals, representing daily activities or more complicated endeavors. Next, people use their cognition skills to recognize pathways they can follow in pursuit of goals. Third, people need agency, demonstrating the motivation and perseverance required to engage in pathways, for goal resolution. All three cognitive elements are essential to Snyder’s hope theory.

Obstacles, including negative emotions, attitudes, and experiences, affect whether people believe they can complete goals. People with high hope often pursue several goals simultaneously, express confidence in their abilities, and excel in school, athletics, or work. Hope also aids people in coping with such medical concerns as cancer. Imbalanced hope theory components can frustrate people who are unsure how to attain their goals or lack sufficient motivation. Although hope can empower people, psychology professionals recognize the absence of hope can impair mental health and result in depression.

In the twenty-first century, research in hope theory has considered topics such as the positive or negative impact of unexpected events on hope. Emotions produced when people react to emergencies or other traumatic occurrences can motivate them to achieve goals such as fleeing danger or assisting injured people. Many twenty-first-century studies indicate that hope fosters resilience, increases self-esteem, and improves mental health, and some research has shown that hope can improve daily functioning and some symptoms in individuals with chronic illness or post-traumatic stress disorder.

Measuring Hope

Mental health professionals use hope measurement to provide patients with effective therapy that enhances existing hope or counters helplessness. In the April 1975 Journal of Clinical Psychology, Richard Erickson, Robin Post, and Albert Paige introduced their Hope Scale, inspired by Stotland’s scholarship. In this scale, people use a seven-point scale to respond to twenty goal statements. They also assign numerical values from one to one hundred to rate how attainable they perceive each goal to be.

During the 1980s, Staats developed the Expected Balance Scale (EBS) to evaluate adults’ emotion-based hope with responses to a list of eighteen items, equally divided between negative and positive statements. Staats and Marjorie Stassen measured cognitive aspects with the Hope Index, which included sixteen items that people ranked in four categories: hope for themselves, hope for others, wishes, and expectations.

In the 1990s, Snyder developed several hope measurement tests. The Adult Dispositional Hope Scale consists of twelve statements to assess pathways and agency. The Children’s Hope Scale (CHS), with six items quantified by a six-point scale, is for children aged seven through sixteen. Snyder’s Domain Specific Hope Scale focuses on relationship goals or other precise concerns. His Young Children’s Hope Scale (YCHS) evaluated children aged five to seven.

Other hope tests for adults include the forty-item Miller Hope Scale, the thirty-two-item Herth Hope Scale, the twelve-item Herth Hope Index, and the Nowotny Hope Scale, which typically has an average of forty-seven questions, but this varies with each patient. Some psychologists observed patients’ actions pursuing goals to measure hope. In the June 1974 Archives of General Psychiatry, Louis Gottschalk described evaluating verbal samples for hope. Mary Vance devised the Narrative Hope scale in the 1990s to examine stories for references to pathways and agency. Hope measurement scales were frequently translated into Asian or European languages and adapted for compatibility with distinct cultures, such as a Norwegian version of the Herth Hope Index. Additionally, several psychological scales that measure hope have been adapted into shorter versions or adapted to fit a particular patient demographic in the twenty-first century, including the Adult Trait Hope Scale, the Herth Hope Index, and the Locus Of Hope Scale. The Perceived Hope Scale (PHS) was developed in the 2010s.

Bibliography

Abramson, Ashley. "Hope as the Antidote." American Psychological Association, 1 Jan. 2024, www.apa.org/monitor/2024/01/trends-hope-greater-meaning-life. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

"Hope Is a Powerful Healer for Mental Health." NetCare, 9 Oct. 2023, www.netcare.co.za/News-Hub/Articles/hope-is-a-powerful-healer-for-mental-health. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

Lopez, Shane J., et al. “Hope: Many Definitions, Many Measures.” Positive Psychological Assessment: A Handbook of Models and Measures, edited by Lopez and Snyder, American Psychological Association, 2003.

Reading, Anthony. Hope and Despair: How Perceptions of the Future Shape Human Behavior. Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Robles-Ramamurthy, Barbara. "Building Resilience: The Power of Hope for Mental Health." Psychology Today, 26 Sept. 2024, www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/collective-healing/202409/building-resilience-the-power-of-hope-for-mental-health. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

Snyder, C. R., editor. Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications. Academic Press, 2000.

Snyder, C. R., et al. Hope for the Journey: Helping Children through Good Times and Bad. Westview Press, 1997.

Snyder, C. R., et al. The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology. 3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2021.