Partner support and goal outcomes: A multilevel meta‐analysis and a methodological critique

Responsive support: A matter of psychological need fulfillment

Skillful responsive support facilitates coping with stressors and overcoming challenges. We posit that support responsiveness is best understood through the prism of psychological need fulfillment and as varying along two dimensions. The horizontal dimension speaks to the specificity and breadth of support (i.e., which needs, and how many, are addressed by it, respectively). The vertical dimension speaks to the degree to which support is enacted, or perceived to be enacted, in ways that touch on self-coherence needs for meaning and identity, needs tied most strongly to recipients' core selves. Empathic identification of psychological needs and of their deeper structure, often achieved through good listening, is argued to be the key for effective responsive support.

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation. With this special issue of Motivation and Emotion, we aim to stimulate such progress in research on goal disengagement. To this end, this special issue includes empirical studies with cross-sectional, prospective, longitudinal, and experimental designs with a wide range of personal and experimentally induced goals as well as invited commentaries from scholars across different psychological sub disciplines. In this introductory essay, we provide a brief review of the current state of goal disengagement research. We also provide an overview about the contributions to this special issue with reflections related to the current state of research and areas where further advancement in conceptualization and empirical studies is needed.