Hope and personality: OCEAN of hopeful thinking

Description

Page: 1310-1314

Anamika Das, Divya Arora, and Varsha Singh (Department of Psychology, Kamala Nehru College, Delhi University, New Delhi)

Hope can be defined as the process of positive thinking in which the person make use of Pathway and Agency thinking. Pathway thinking is the ability to produce alternate routes when original ones are blocked. Agency thinking is requisite inspiration to use the pathway to reach desired goal. Hope allows people to deal with problems with a deliberate mind-set and through a planned strategy. Hope is a positive expectation about the future that motivates goal directed behaviour, and leads to the development of wholesome personality. The five factors commonly used to describe personality are Openness to experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and extraversion. The aim of this research was to understand the relationship between hope and big five personality trait for young adults. In this research a sample of 235 Female aged 18-25 years were assessed on the Hope Scale and the NEO-FFI-3 and Pearson Correlational design was used. Results indicated that Hope, and its components Agency Thinking and Pathway Thinking were significantly positively correlated to Conscientiousness and Extraversion. Neuroticism and Openness to Experience significantly correlated with Hope, while only Openness to Experience correlated with Pathway Thinking and no significant correlations were found with respect to Agency Thinking. Lastly, Agreeableness Personality Trait established no significant Correlations with Hope or its components. Thus the study was concluded with a comprehensive understanding of Hope and its relationship with Global Personality dimensions.