The Effect of Hope on Pain Tolerance - )

Information-Based Manipulation of Hope

Common sense views hope as the belief, or expectation, that the future will be better than the present. Although one can engage in hoping even when all is well, like the hope of winning a lottery and become a millionaire overnight, this paper focuses on situations in which there is a hope that an ongoing hardship, or distress, will be alleviated in the future. In this context, hoping implies some cognitive analysis that out of all possible futures emphasizes the more positive ones. Thus, when pondering the future, some form of a "pleasure principle" operates as a selection criterion. It is this aspect of hoping that makes it an emotional as well as a cognitive process.

Hoping is an extremely subjective phenomenon, and a person's thoughts and wishes are well hidden within the walls of intimacy. Any attempt to research this area with the appropriate methodological rigor must, therefore, find means to either penetrate this enclosure, or circumvent it. The second option is the one of choice, since it is much easier to effect change in the level of hoping than to measure it at any given point in time. Furthermore, I argue that since hope involves expectations about the future, one of the simplest and yet powerful ways to influence these expectations is by providing information. More specifically, if hoping consists of belief and expectation that a present hardship will be alleviated in the future, then it should be profoundly affected by information about when that will happen!

Our ability to anticipate the future makes expectations at least as important in determining the stress response as presently occurring stressors. Information about the future is the stuff that psychological stress is made of, and is a major factor to be considered in any attempt to explicate the complexity of the stress area. Furthermore, such information is the raw material for cognitive appraisal processes that are central to the understanding of psychological stress (Lazarus, 1991; Goldberger & Breznitz, 1992). Within the context of a particularly stressful task or situation, information about its onset and subsequent termination is, of course, of primary importance. Considering their relevance to performance under stress, the paucity of systematic research of these temporal variables is quite striking. Whereas stress onset variables were given some attention, stress termination has been virtually neglected. There is hardly a more dramatic illustration of its impact on endurance than the "tour of duty" phenomenon. Its potency to affect both physical and psychological functioning was first appreciated in World War II.

In an important chapter in The American Soldier, Janis (1949) described the intense stress to which crews of American bombers were exposed during their nightly missions over Germany. Planes and crews were lost each night, and had to be replaced by new ones. At some point, many members of these crews developed major symptoms of stress, and often could not continue flying. The psychological analysis of these soldiers indicated that they felt caught in a situation of hopelessness. Each night brought new casualties, and from their point of view it was only a matter of time until their turn would come.

The U.S. Air Corps dealt with this situation in a psychologically elegant and effective way. The crews were informed that their tour of duty consisted of forty missions, after which they would be relocated to a safer theater of operation. Although forty missions were not less than they were flying before, and although planes were still being downed by enemy action just as before, psychologically the situation altered dramatically, with excellent results in terms of symptom reduction and prevention. Instead of counting forward (e.g., "today it was this friend, tomorrow it can be me"), the airmen started to count backwards (e.g., "thirty nine to go, thirty eight to go, etc."). Thus, with each new mission their hope of coming out of the experience alive was augmented. Stated differently, by telling the airmen when the danger would be over, their expectations became much more positive, and hope could be introduced into the situation.

In spite of the success of the "tour of duty" intervention, and in spite of its subsequent usage as standard policy in many areas of conflict, the underlying psychological mechanisms of this phenomenon were never systematically studied. This is particularly surprising in view of the powerful impact of such information endurance and well being of these highly stressed individuals. The main objective of the present research was to analyze this paradigm in a laboratory setting. An experimental program controlling the relevant features of the information can make it possible to map its potential enhancement of effective functioning under stressful conditions.

The power of information, however, is such that if it happens to be discouraging to the person, its impact can be psychologically detrimental. Were the pilots told that their tour of duty consisted of one hundred missions rather than forty, or that they will have to fly every night until the end of the war, instead of bringing the light to the end of the tunnel, such information could well deepen the darkness instead. It is thus necessary to test the typical pitfalls and constraints of this paradigm, as well as its opportunities. The experimental program contained, therefore, specific attempts to understand how certain types of information, and/or its timing, can lead to either psychological encouragement, or discouragement.