The campaign seemed to embody slacktivism at its most poisonous: the high hope that you can change the world from your sofa. In fact, such a hope might make her job harder because she’d have to deal with the despair when this hope gets dashed, as it will again and again. Dr. Brackett, who founded and runs the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, said hope involves problem solving and planning. “The people who only have hope but not a plan only really have despair,” Dr. Brackett explained “because hope doesn’t result in an outcome.”Former CNN correspondent Arwa Damon (R) at the ZEG Fest in Tbilisi this year. I took these questions about hope to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, an acclaimed psychologist and neuroscientist.