Abstract
How we perceive the future can greatly affect how we feel in the present. Even a currently positive situation is hard to bear when we know the future will be grim. Indeed, previous research has found that more hopeful people are happier. However, both hope and subjective well-being are multidimensional concepts comprising emotion (i.e., anticipation and affect), cognition (expectation and satisfaction) and, to some degree, motivation. Since most studies include only one dimension of hope and subjective well-being, little is known about how different aspects of hope relate to different aspects of subjective well-being. This study aims to gain insight into these relationships by providing an overview of the existing empirical literature on hope and subjective well-being. Subsequently, cross-sectional data of a representative sample of the American population are used to further examine the relationship between hope and subjective well-being. Our findings from both the literature and our empirical analysis show that positive expectations are only weakly associated with all domains of subjective well-being, whereas cognitive and emotional hope are most strongly related to subjective well-being. This finding indicates that the more passive characteristics of positive expectations have less of an impact on subjective well-being than a more agentic hopeful disposition.
Highlights
Hope and subjective well-being are closely connected (Bailey et al 2007)
Even though we know that hope and happiness are generally positively related, we do not yet know how different aspects of these concepts, e.g., hope as an expectation, emotion or thought-pattern and happiness as life satisfaction or positive affect, are related
When we turn to the existing empirical evidence, we observe that in psychology, but increasingly in sociology and economics, some empirical research has been conducted on the relationship between different types of hope and subjective well-being
Summary
Hope and subjective well-being are closely connected (Bailey et al 2007). A hopeful disposition usually makes us feel happier, and feeling well often strengthens our hope for a good future. People who are more hopeful are more creative and show more perseverance in pursuing their goals, which in turn could result in higher levels of happiness by gaining more successful experiences (Snyder 2000; Bailey et al 2007) Another possible explanation for the relationship between hope and subjective well-being is that people who are hopeful see more opportunities and more achieve the things that make them satisfied with their life, such as a successful relationship or career. Positive expectations of the future generally concern more abstract social developments that lie outside the individual, whereas other forms of hope focus on achieving concrete, personal goals It is precisely these personal goals, for which we are intrinsically motivated, that usually contribute to our happiness (Ryan and Deci 2000). We consider a correlation between 0 and 0.19 to be very weak, between 0.2 and 0.39 to be weak, between 0.40 and 0.59 to be moderate, between 0.6 and 0.79 to be strong, and between 0.8 and 1 to be very strong (Evans 1996)
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