The Hopeful Brain

This image is part of a collection of hope-based art and activist campaign called #SpringofHope and curated by Fine Acts, a nonprofit.

Source: Teo Georgiev, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A friend once described the world we live in as “wiggly.” It can be difficult to grab hold of even what is most important to us in the midst of chaos, war, hatred, violence, and struggle. But scientists have demonstrated, repeatedly, that in addition to making us feel better, staying hopeful about the future can help us succeed.

For example, researchers have found a significant negative correlation between hope and depression and anxiety in cancer patients; as hope increased, depression and anxiety decreased (Rajandram, Ho et al., 2011). Snyder et al. (2002) found that entering college students who had scored high on the Hope Scale (a paper-and-pencil test assessing hopefulness) had higher grade point averages and were more likely to graduate than were students who scored low on the Hope Scale.

So, what is hope? Emily Dickinson described it as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” (Dickinson, 1891).

That’s a lovely thought, and poetic. However, if we want to study hope, we need a more scientific, more specific definition. Charles Snyder, the originator of hope theory in psychology, defined hope as being made up of two elements: First, the belief that our goals can be met, or a sense of agency. We’ve set out to achieve a goal in the past or present and see achieving that goal in the future as possible. And second, we perceive that a successful pathway to that goal is available to us. We can see how to get where we want to be (Snyder, Harris, et al., 1991).

Picking up on this initial research, others studying hope have defined it as the combination of the belief that the future can be better than the present (optimism) and, second, the belief that we have the capacity or the ability to make that better future happen.

These two elements are related to one another, but are not the same thing. It is possible to see the future as potentially better than the present or the past, but not see a way to make that better future happen. This belief by itself is optimism, but not hope. At the same time, we can see a way to achieve a goal but lack the motivation to make it happen. Again, this is not hope. When motivation and means are combined, we have hope.

The Prefrontal Cortex of the human brain showing two main regions.

Source: Natalie M. Zahr, Ph.D., and Edith V. Sullivan, Ph.D., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Several lines of research have linked both hope and optimism to the brain’s frontal lobe. For example, Dolcos, Hu, Iordan, Moore, and Dolcos (2016) found evidence that linked the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to “trait optimism,” or the tendency for people to have positive expectations about the future that was stable across time and situation. They also found that trait optimism was positively correlated with the volume of the OFC, meaning higher OFC volumes tended to be seen in the more optimistic people, and that both OFC volume and trait optimism were negatively correlated with anxiety; as optimism and OFC volume rose, levels of anxiety fell.

In a study of hope and the brain, Wang, Xu, Zhou et al., (2017) examined Resting State fMRI (RS-fMRI) recordings from healthy adolescents. RS-fMRI looks at brain function in brains that are not actively engaging in a task—sort of the brain in idle mode. This lets researchers look at spontaneous activity in the brain, or activity not being elicited by a task. Spontaneous activity is interesting because it differs across individuals, and research has found that individual differences in behavior are correlated with individual differences in the patterns of spontaneous activity. Lucina Uddin, who studies spontaneous activity in the human brain, says, “[O]ngoing spontaneous cortical activity may represent a continuous prediction signal that interacts with incoming input to generate updated representations of the world.”

Wang et al., (2017) found that higher levels of hope were related to lower levels of a particular type of spontaneous activity called Fractional Amplitude Low Frequency Fluctuations, or FALFF, reflecting activity from the OFC. They note that several other studies have found higher FALFF in patients with “hope-related” disorders like depression, PTSD, OCD, and social anxiety disorder.

They speculated that the higher levels of spontaneous activity in the OFC of low-hope participants reflected a greater need for, and greater effort spent in, suppressing subcortical neural activity. Subcortical activity reflects activity in areas related to movement, memory, the senses, or emotion, whereas cortical activity reflects higher-level functions like planning, language, reasoning, or conscious thought.

Higher spontaneous activity in the OFC might also reflect a stronger need to modulate other cortical neural activity, or perhaps the activity of an unknown compensatory mechanism needed to overcome a problem with brain function or structure. It is interesting to note that Wang et al., did not find any structural differences in the OFC across their participants.

Emotions Essential Reads

In an Age of Vulnerability, Why Is Help So Hard to Ask For?

What Happens When We Push Emotions Down?

The search for how hope and optimism might be protecting us from anxiety and depression is ongoing.