We often think of hope as an emotion, something like sadness or disappointment or joy that comes and goes, ebbs and flows, with our lived experiences. This warm sense of possibility and optimism can kind of feel like an emotion because we often experience it in sporadic intervals rather than having it embedded in our cognitive processes as a useful coping tool.

But did you know that hope is actually a learned skill? While it does have affective (a.k.a. emotional) elements, too, it is largely motivated by cognition.

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