Research Shows One Emotion Is The Most Powerful Driving Force In Our Lives — And It’s Not Happiness
Truth is, you can't be happy without this emotion.
Zigres | Shutterstock Emotions have a powerful impact on how we see the world and ourselves. A generous dose of happiness or humor can help us get through days that feel a bit darker. In fact, it would be easy to assume that happiness is the most powerful emotion we can feel.
As it turns out, this is actually not true. Researchers from the University of Missouri discovered that there is one emotion that actually does more to push us forward than even happiness does.
According to a study, hope is the most powerful driving force in our lives.
The study, which called hope a “meaningful emotion,” was published in the journal Emotion. Rodielon Putol covered the study for Earth.com. He described hope as “a lifeline.” While many of us recognize the importance of hope, understanding just how vital it is to our well-being proves to be a bit more elusive.
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Megan Edwards, a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University and the lead author of the study, could not overstate the importance of hope. “Our research shifts the perspective on hope from merely a cognitive process related to goal attainment to recognizing it as a vital emotional experience that enriches life’s meanings,” she stated.
Hope is such an important emotion because it gives people meaning in their lives.
To conduct the study, researchers held a total of six experiments that involved over 2,300 participants. The researchers examined the effect of various emotions we would consider to be positive, like happiness and excitement.
There was one emotion that stood out as making the biggest difference in people’s lives. As Putol said, “Only hope consistently predicted a stronger sense of meaning in life … It’s tied to better relationships, improved physical health, higher income, and greater emotional well-being.”
Professor Laura King, one of the study’s co-authors, commented on how important hope is to feeling as though life is meaningful. “Experiencing life as meaningful is crucial for just about every good thing you can imagine in a person’s life,” she said. “This cornerstone of psychological functioning is not a rare experience — it is available to people in their everyday lives, and hope is one of the things that make life feel meaningful.”
It's also integral to any and all goals and success. Matthew Gallagher, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Houston told USA Today, "Hope is how we can think about our goals for the future, the extent that we can identify pathways or strategies to achieve those goals and then maintaining the motivation or the agency to kind of keep working towards those goals, even in the face of obstacles or setbacks."
Hope stands out among positive emotions.
Putol pointed out that one of the most important things about hope is its longevity. For example, happiness, though important, is more of an in-the-moment kind of emotion. You feel happy because of something that happened, but that happiness can easily be replaced by other emotions within a short span of time if something less desirable happens.
On the other hand, you have gratitude, which is retrospective. It’s certainly essential to take time to feel gratitude for the good things that have happened to you, but it has little bearing on the present when it really comes down to it.
Hope is like the perfect counterbalance to these two emotions because it focuses on the future. This is how it works to keep you going. If you have hope for something, then you keep working towards that thing. It is not momentary or based on something that has already happened. Rather, it is rooted in the future and the idea that it can be better than you ever imagined.
Other studies have backed up the importance of hope.
In another study published in Global Epidemiology, researchers found that hope had a positive impact on both physical and emotional health. While these psychological findings were already fairly well known, the physical benefits were less so. Nevertheless, when summarizing the findings for PsychCentral, Traci Pedersen noted that hope led to lower rates of cancer and chronic illness, as well as a decreased mortality rate.
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While it may be easy to overlook hope, or even to lose it as we follow the journey of life, it is essential to each person’s well-being and leads to a truly more meaningful life. It is the one emotion we can count on to propel us forward.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
