Other Papers Polish Psychological Bulletin 2004, vol. 35 (3) 173-182 Jerzy Trzebiński* Mariusz Zięba* Basic hope as a world-view: an outline of a concept After Erikson's (1963, 1964) conceptualization, a new theory of basic hope is proposed. Basic hope is considered a fundamental constituent of an individual’s world view, mostly unconscious and learned very early. It consists o f the belief in two characteristics o f the world: its higher order and sense and its general positivity towards a human being. Basic Hope Inventory (BHI) was developed to measure the strength of basic hope. The first data indicates that basic hope correlates positively with adaptive reactions to personal loss and with constructive long-term consequences o f it and that these correlations are independent from the impact of optimism and hope for success (Snyder, 1994). Basic hope seems to predict positive effects in psychotherapy, it correlates positively with well-being and negatively with anxiety, depression and psychosomatic symptoms. Keywords: hope, basic hope, personal loss, coping Our aim is to outline the notion of hope derived from Erikson’s theory of personality development (Erikson, 1963, 1964). In this theory hope is considered as a fundamental belief belonging to an individual’s world-view. This meaning of hope is different from the popular notion that relates hope to self-knowledge or belief in one’s own future perspectives. The Eriksonian hope is thus a feature of the world, as understood by people, whereas the other kind of hope is a conviction about the self - more specifically, about his or her own future. This difference is not a semantic matter. In our opinion, it points to two autonomous psychological structures with a distinct regulative power. In this article we propose the conceptualization of hope in the Eriksonian sense and present data supporting our hypotheses. We will use the term basic hope to relate to hope as a constituent of a world's view, to accentuate a fundamental role it plays in personality development, according to Erikson, and to delineate it from more ego-centered hope. A theory Two hopes Common sense and mainstream psychological practice tells us that hope relates to the self. It is almost a common agreement that hope is a conviction about our own attributes, or attri- butes of our own fate, and means expectation of a positive trajectory toward future events, especially as regards the fulfilment of one’s own goals (Frank, 1973; Menninger, 1959; Mowrer, 1960; Snyder, 1994; Stotland, 1969). A good example of this notion is Snyder’s contemporary theory of hope (Snyder, 1994, Snyder, Cheavens, Michael, 2000). He has postulated recently that; "Hope is a reciprocally derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal- directed determination) and (b) pathways (planning of ways to meet goals)." ( ..... ) "Pathway thought involves the perceived capacity to come up with mental road maps to reach goals. Second, the individual thinks about his or her perceived capability to move along the selected pathway to the goal. Agency thought mobilizes the person to * Warsaw School of Social Psychology AUTHORS ADDRESSES: Jerzy Trzebiński, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, 03-815 Warszawa, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, e-mail: jerzy.trzebinski@swps.edu.pl Mariusz Zięba, Warsaw School of Social Psychology, 03-815 Warszawa, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, e-mail: mariusz.zieba@swps.edu.pl