Hopelessness Changing Rate in Iranian Society Based on Movies

This study aims to investigate the changing rates of "hopelessness" and "hopefulness" in Iranian society over the past fifty years, spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s. The study will rely on a selection of best-selling movies that reflect the social reality of any society and have the largest audience, consisting of six movies per decade. In fact, we identify the metaphors and linguistic constructions encoding "hopelessness" and "hopefulness" in the selected corpus. By comparing the token frequency of these metaphors and constructions over the fifty-year period, the study aims to quantify the rates of hopelessness and hopefulness, while analyzing them qualitatively to understand the cognitive patterns of Iranians towards hope over time. The results illustrate that "hopelessness" in Iranian society has generally increased significantly and steadily over the past fifty years. Furthermore, in terms of the cognitive pattern of hope, it can be argued that Iranians associate "hopelessness" with "inability" and characterize "hopefulness" by "dynamism" and "reliance on God."