You gotta have hope, people

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The poet Emily Dickinson wrote: Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tunes without the words and never stops at all.

Dickinson was right on, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Assn. in Boston. Researchers from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and Ohio State University presented evidence that people with hope have fewer symptoms of depression. And, they said, hope is something that can be taught.

‘If you feel you know how to get what you want out of life, and you have that desire to make that happen, then you have hope,’ said co-author Jennifer Cheavens, a psychologist at OSU. That is different than optimism, which is a general expectation that good things will happen. Hope involves having goals and a plan to achieve them.

The study involved 87 older adults who had been diagnosed with a serious eye condition, called macular degeneration, that causes the loss of vision. The researchers measured hope and depression among the people with low vision and their caregivers. They found that the caregivers were likely to have significant depressive symptoms if the patients they cared for were depressed. But caregivers who scored higher on measures of hope showed fewer depressive symptoms even if the people they cared for were depressed.

In another study, the researchers divided 32 people who said they felt dissatisfied with their lives into two groups. One group received training in hope-related skills, such as identifying goals, ways to achieve them and how to motivate themselves. Compared with the people without this training, the ‘hope’ group had reduced depressive symptoms.

-- Shari Roan