Beauty and hope: a moral beauty intervention

Pedagogical intervention regarding engagement with natural, artistic and moral beauty can lead to an increase in trait hope. In a quasi-experimental design with college students the intervention group showed significantly higher gain scores on trait hope than did the comparison group; the effect size was moderate. The experimental group also experienced significantly larger increases with engagement with moral beauty ; the effect size was large. The discussion section focuses on integrating understanding beauty with moral education pedagogy, using a key element in philosophical definitions of beauty : unity-in-diversity. It is hypothesized that such pedagogy will increase engagement with natural, artistic and moral beauty and thus raise trait hope