Hope and happiness are often placed in the same bright category, as if both simply mean that life feels good. They are not quite the same kind of feeling. Happiness describes something about the present. Hope can remain alive when the present is difficult, because it rests on the possibility that what comes next may be different.
That distinction sits behind a University of Missouri-led research programme published in the journal Emotion. Across six studies, whose published abstract reports a combined 2,312 participants, hopeful feelings repeatedly predicted a stronger sense that life was meaningful after other positive emotions were taken into account.
The most persuasive result came from a five-wave study conducted across a university semester. Happiness, excitement, confidence, energy and hope were all associated with meaning in the same moment. Hope, however, was the only one that predicted meaning at the following wave when the researchers considered the emotions together.
There is an important limit before that finding becomes a lesson about how anyone ought to live. Prediction across time is not proof of cause. Two experiments in the same paper attempted to move meaning by inducing different moods, and neither produced a direct experimental effect on meaning in life.
The study treated hope as a feeling, not only a plan
Psychological research has often treated hope as a way of thinking about goals. In this tradition, “agency” means believing that one can move towards an outcome, while “pathways” means seeing possible routes for getting there. Together they describe an active, goal-directed form of hope.
Megan Edwards, Jordan Booker, Kevin Cook, Miao Miao, Yiqun Gan and Laura King focused on something related but separable: affective hope. This is the felt experience captured by statements such as “I feel hopeful” or “I can see hope for my future”.
The difference is more than terminology. A person can feel hopeful when there is no useful action left to take. Once an application has been submitted, a test completed or an important conversation finished, the practical pathways may temporarily close. The person can still feel that a good outcome is possible.
In the first two studies, hopeful feeling predicted meaning even when the statistical models included measures of agency, pathways and general positive affect. The emotional side of hope therefore contributed something that was not fully captured by either goal-directed thinking or a broadly good mood.
This does not make planning unimportant. It means the paper was asking a narrower question than whether goal setting gives life purpose. It asked whether feeling hopeful has its own relationship with the experience of meaning.
Six studies approached the same question from different angles
The peer-reviewed article appeared online in March 2025 and in the September 2025 issue of Emotion. It combined cross-sectional surveys, daily reports, a short longitudinal study and two experiments rather than relying on a single questionnaire.
Study 1 analysed 183 US adults recruited online. Study 2 used another online US sample of 755 people and expanded the meaning measure to cover coherence, purpose and significance. These studies established that hope and meaning were related at one point in time, but their cross-sectional design could not show which came first.
Study 3 was a secondary analysis of daily diaries from 132 adults taking educational psychology evening courses in China. For three weeks, participants reported how hopeful, excited, happy, energetic and confident they felt, along with whether life felt meaningful that day.
Study 4 followed 301 US students enrolled in an introductory personality class. They completed five survey waves across a semester, spaced at approximately three-week intervals. This let the researchers ask whether an emotion reported at one wave predicted meaning at the next.
The final two studies moved from observation to intervention. One randomly assigned US adults to cheerful, sad or neutral mood inductions. The other assigned participants to read a hopeful or hopeless article about climate change. The accessible manuscript reports the procedures, exclusions and analyses in detail, and links its data and materials to public repositories.
Hope added something to an otherwise positive day
In the Chinese diary study, every measured positive emotion was associated with greater daily meaning. On days when people felt happier, more excited, more energetic or more confident, they also tended to say that life felt more meaningful.
Hope did not erase those relationships. When all five emotions appeared in the same model, each remained a significant positive predictor. Adding hope nevertheless improved how well the model accounted for daily meaning.
This is subtler than saying hope beat happiness in a simple contest. Positive emotions travel together. A person who feels hopeful may also feel confident and energised, making it difficult to isolate one perfectly from the others. The researchers used statistical controls to estimate what hope added after their overlap was considered.
That pattern helps clarify the title’s claim. Many positive emotions were associated with a meaningful life. The distinctive part was that hopeful feeling continued to contribute information after those emotions were placed beside it.
It also echoes a different route to meaning explored in Scandinavia Standard’s earlier look at nostalgia. Nostalgia connects the present to a personally significant past. Hope points in the opposite temporal direction, towards a future that can make the present feel part of a continuing story.
Only hope carried clearly into the next wave
The five-wave semester study supplied the paper’s clearest evidence about order in time. Within each wave, global hope and a composite of positive emotions both predicted meaning. The same was true when the individual feelings were considered rather than bundled together.
The researchers then used each wave’s emotions to predict meaning one wave later. Global hope remained a significant positive predictor. The positive-affect composite did not. Models that separated happiness, excitement, energy and confidence produced the same broad result: the single hope item predicted meaning at the next wave.
“Over time” therefore has a specific meaning here. It refers to five measurements at roughly three-week intervals during one semester, not a finding that hopeful people necessarily remain more fulfilled across decades.
Nor does statistical prediction mean that the researchers could forecast one student’s life from a hope score. It means that, across the sample and after the included variables were considered, higher hope at one survey was associated with greater meaning at the following survey.
Meaning itself was measured through self-report. The researchers asked people whether they understood their life’s meaning and whether life felt purposeful or significant. Those are reasonable ways to study a subjective experience, but they are not external measures of what makes a life objectively meaningful.
The experiments did not establish that hope causes meaning
The two experiments are essential because their results resist the neatest version of the story. In Study 5, participants went through cheerful, sad or neutral mood inductions. In Study 6, they read competing articles presenting climate change as hopeful or hopeless.
The manipulations changed the feelings they were designed to change. The climate articles, for example, produced a substantial difference in reported hope and a smaller difference in happiness. Yet the hopeful condition did not directly increase global meaning, purpose, coherence or significance.
The cheerful induction also failed to produce a direct increase in meaning. In the paper’s own discussion, the authors describe these efforts to establish causal links as unsuccessful. That sentence deserves as much attention as the positive longitudinal result.
Mediation analyses did identify indirect statistical paths through hope. In the climate experiment, only the indirect path through hope remained significant when hope and happiness were entered together. But an indirect association does not cancel the missing direct effect or prove the proposed causal chain.
The evidence therefore supports a robust and distinctive relationship. It does not yet establish that making a person feel hopeful will, by itself, make life feel more meaningful. Hope could foster meaning, meaning could help sustain hope, or both could be influenced by another part of a person’s circumstances.
Why hope might fit meaning better than simple pleasure
Meaning in life is not another name for happiness. Researchers commonly divide it into coherence, the sense that life makes sense; purpose, the sense that it has direction; and significance, the sense that one’s existence matters.
A pleasant afternoon may raise mood without changing any of those judgements. A difficult period may lower happiness while remaining deeply purposeful. The experiences overlap, but they can move apart.
Hope plausibly fits this structure because it links the present to an imagined future. A setback can become one part of a longer sequence rather than the final statement about what is possible. That forward connection may support purpose and make today’s uncertainty feel less disconnected from the rest of life.
This interpretation also helps explain why hope can be available when cheerfulness is not. It does not require someone to decide that a hard situation is secretly pleasant. The present can remain disappointing while the future remains open.
A recent Scandinavia Standard article on falling self-reported optimism and purpose described the same forward pull from another direction. The important caution in both cases is that emotional resources operate inside real conditions. Hope is not a moral duty imposed on someone whose options have been narrowed.
A distinctive association, not a prescription to stay positive
The study has breadth, but its boundaries matter. All six studies were conducted online, all central variables were self-reported, and the US samples were majority White. The Chinese diary sample came from adults in evening education courses rather than a population designed to represent China as a whole.
The longitudinal evidence covered one semester. The experimental inductions were brief and artificial. Those choices gave the researchers control, but they may not reproduce the kind of hope that develops during a consequential period in ordinary life.
Hope is not always accurate either. A hoped-for outcome may never arrive. When useful action is possible, hope without action may be inadequate; when a possibility has genuinely closed, acceptance can carry its own form of meaning. The paper raises these complications rather than claiming that more hope is universally better.
None of this reduces hope to wishful thinking. The repeated association across US and Chinese samples, daily diaries and multiple survey waves is notable. It suggests that hopeful feeling is not merely the pleasant glow shared by happiness, amusement or excitement.
The careful conclusion is narrower, and perhaps more interesting. Hope appears to give the future an emotional presence in the present. That may be why it tracked meaning more consistently than the other positive feelings did: it allows life to have direction before there is any guarantee about where the path will end.