In plain language
Hope is more than wishful thinking. Psychologists define it as the motivation and know-how to pursue long-term goals: believing you can act (agency) and being able to find routes around obstacles (pathways). Plenty of research links hope to well-being, but most of it is a snapshot in time, which leaves a chicken-and-egg question unanswered. Does hope make young people feel better, or do young people who already feel good simply become more hopeful?
To untangle this, the researchers followed 975 Australian adolescents across all six years of high school (Grades 7–12), measuring hope and positive and negative emotions each year, and used cross-lagged statistical models to test which came first. Hope clearly acted as an antecedent of positive emotion: hopeful teenagers went on to experience more joy and enthusiasm, while the reverse effect was weak. For negative emotions the street ran both ways — hope reduced later sadness, fear, and hostility, but those negative states also eroded later hope.
Hope mattered most at transition points: the start of high school (Grade 7) and the move into the senior years (Grade 10), when students face new demands and high-stakes exams. Because hope appears to be a malleable skill rather than a fixed trait, the findings suggest that teaching young people to set goals and flexibly work around setbacks could pay off in genuine emotional well-being — especially when they are navigating big life changes.
Key findings
- In 975 adolescents followed annually from Grade 7 to Grade 12, hope predicted increases in positive affect over time, while positive affect had only a weak, significantly smaller effect on later hope.
- Hope and negative emotions were reciprocally related: hope predicted lower sadness, fear, and hostility, and each of those negative states in turn predicted lower future hope.
- Hope predicted future well-being particularly strongly at school transition points — starting high school (Grade 7) and entering the senior years (Grade 10).
- The hope effects were largely the same for boys and girls; the main gender difference was that fear was less stable over time in boys than in girls.
- The results support Snyder’s hope theory: hopeful, goal-directed thinking drives positive feelings, with little evidence that positive feelings drive hope.
- The findings suggest hope is a malleable attribute that fosters positive youth development and could be a useful target for school-based interventions.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J., Parker, P., Kashdan, T. B., Heaven, P. C. L., & Barkus, E. (2015). Hope and emotional well-being: A six-year study to distinguish antecedents, correlates, and consequences. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(6), 520–532. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2015.1015154
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi2015hope,
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph and Parker, Philip and Kashdan, Todd B. and Heaven, Patrick C. L. and Barkus, Emma},
title = {Hope and emotional well-being: A six-year study to distinguish antecedents, correlates, and consequences},
journal = {The Journal of Positive Psychology},
year = {2015},
volume = {10},
number = {6},
pages = {520--532},
doi = {10.1080/17439760.2015.1015154}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.