In the first of these two postings, I outlined a conceptual approach to measuring the sense of hope or joy in a given situation. This could be a single person's life, someone's past year, or a day in a community. This type of "statistics of the psychological landscape" might prove useful as many initiatives strive to rebuild optimism and happiness in communities just about everywhere these days it seems. There is a literature on mapping psychological perception of the physical environment (compare "statistics of the environment", Movellan & McClelland, 2001). Why not map an individual's or a communities' mental or emotional environment with a similar psychophysics-like approach? The fun part is that there is an intersection between how people are likely to feel interiorly, subjectively, and something science can count and measure. I haven't done the research yet, but I propose that approaching emotion and attitudes can be done with a probabilistic mathematical approach.
Probability that something good just happened?
Before moving on to ‘potential applications' below, I must emphasize that the following is theoretical speculation and inferences are
not claimed as research-supported findings.
Just like the hazard and shock functions, the index of hope and the measure of joy would be influenced in a pragmatic, countable way by the number of times good things happen in a person's life, or a town, or community, or in other social contexts. The more often these types of events occur, the more the index of hope in people's spirits, as conditioned by counts of positive events in people's memory, would be renewed. In addition to frequency of positive events, salience and/or magnitude are likely to play a role. That is, how much any good event stands out in people's minds, or how much good is accomplished.
Paradoxically, a disaster can be a time to renew the index of hope. There are often many chances to create 'good events' within the context of an overall disaster. Neighbour can be seen conspicuously reaching out to neighbour. These conspicuous good actions might well counter the standard prevailing ‘goodwill expectancies' in a community. Positive indicators might even move beyond the baseline levels of hope and of joy prior to the disaster. Mathematical niceties offer small comfort to those who are deeply suffering. I respectfully and sympathetically remain silent about how to handle any specific disaster. But mathematical laws are something you can count on (!), and the basic law here is - anything can add up: bad things can, but good things can, too. There are opportunities to rebuild the mental and moral map of a community, by changing the ‘good events' statistics, one good deed at a time, even sooner than the physical and emotional map can be restored.
This post is conceptual, but I would nonetheless encourage you to think about being a contributor to this hypothesized index of hope. Ratchet up that 'likelihood-of-the-good'. You'll be glad you did.
Likelihood-of-the-good in the next instant?
Movellan, J.R., and McClelland, J.L. (2001). The Morton-Massaro law of information integration: Implications for models of perception. Psychological Review, 108, 113-148.
