We’re excited to announce a recent team paper, led by former University of Missouri student Megan Edwards–now a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University–and Dr. Laura King at the University of Missouri. This paper, titled “Hope as a Meaningful Emotion: Hope, Positive Affect, and Meaning in Life”, is in press at the journal Emotion, and included scholars from the United States and China (Peking University). This project used six studies to show ways individual differences in hope are important for the ways people have meaning in their lives.
- Hope has been studied as both a set of cognitive approaches (i.e., people can interpret situations as more hopeful for having success; people can evaluate that they are better equipped for accomplishing certain outcomes) and as a set of emotion experiences (i.e., to feel hopeful that things will ultimately go well, even in a moment of frustration or despair is a profound feeling). Researchers have been more likely to study hope as a reflection of thinking and reasoning, more often than as an emotional experience. This interest with hope as an emotion was key for this project.
- To have meaning in life involves feeling as though your life has purpose and that you have control over the direction of your life. To have meaning is critical for well-being and healthy psychological functioning. Colleagues like Dr. Laura King argue that all of us are capable of finding meaning and that we can find meaning from many events in our lives, great and small.
Our team was interested in testing ways people’s experiences with hope as an emotion could be related to feeling like life holds more meaning. We were interested in how hope, distinct from other positive emotion experiences like joy, would be related to meaning in life both in the moment and over time. We were interested in whether experiments manipulating experiences of hopefulness in the moment would also predict greater meaning in life.
Broadly, we found evidence that time and again, feeling more hopeful was related to having a greater sense of meaning in life. Hopefulness provided distinct information from other positive emotion experiences. And hopefulness could be manipulated in experimental conditions, with differences in hope continuing to be important for people’s sense of meaning.
Our project benefited from multiple study designs and a focus on multiple cultural populations to show comparable findings that hope and meaning in life are robustly related. There is value in continuing to study the importance of hopeful feelings and thoughts with other areas of well-being and health for people.
References and Additional Readings:
Booker, J. A., Brakke, K., & Pierre, N. (2022). It’s time to make more goals so I can keep pushing: Hope, growth, and well-being among young Black women. Emerging Adulthood, 10(4), 21676968221089179. https://doi.org/10.1177/21676968221089179
Edwards, M., Booker, J. A., Cook, K., Miao, M., Gan, Y., & King, L. (2025). Hope as a meaningful emotion: Hope, positive affect, and meaning in life. Manuscript in press at Emotion.
King, L. A., & Hicks, J. A. (2021). The science of meaning in life. Annual Review of Psychology, 72(1), 561–584. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-072420-122921
Disclosures:
©American Psychological Association, 2025. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: 10.1037/emo0001513
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