Losing the light at the end of the tunnel: Depression, future thinking, and hope

Abstract

Is the capacity to experience hope central to our ability to entertain desirable future possibilities in thought? The ability to project oneself forward in time, or to entertain vivid positive episodic future thoughts, is impaired in patients with clinical depression. In this article, I consider the causal relation between, on the one hand, the loss of the affective experience of hope in depressed patients, and on the other hand, the reduced ability to generate and entertain positive episodic future thinking. I suggest that findings in the philosophy of emotion may shed light on this causal relation.

Hope: a solution to the puzzle of difficult action

“…possible is further processed in order to evaluate the context, requirements, and consequences implied by the scenario in which it materializes. The deployment of cognitive resources triggered by hope as involving an attentional aspect may take diverse forms, from the generation of vivid representations of the hoped-for outcome's realization, to cognitive activities aimed at gaining additional information on the possible conditions of its concrete realization (Vazard 2023). I suggest that the function of hope in triggering the deployment of cognitive resources to generate paths to one's desired outcome is especially manifest in contexts of difficult action.…”

“…We should instead accept that hope involves a 'third element', and identify an additional aspect of hope to account for its distinctive motivational power and influence on rational action. To pin down the state that agents in Betsy's position have special, agent-relative reasons to be in, I suggest that we start from the 'Attention View' of substantial hope (see Rioux 2022;Chignell 2023;Vazard 2023 for discussion), on which hope involves a particular attentional dimension. Not only does the Attention View of substantial hope enjoy independent support from the philosophy of emotion and the claim that emotions involve 'patterns of salience' (de Sousa 1987): it can also account for the kind of 'agential' control that we often have over hope (see Chignell 2023, 59-61), for the distinction between hope's motivational power and desire's, and for the connection between hope and risk-inclination (see Rioux 2022, Section 6).…”