Sense of purpose predicts daily positive events and attenuates their influence on positive affect

Increases in sense of purpose predict future positive changes in personality traits

This longitudinal study examined the reciprocal relationship between the Big Five personality traits and sense of purpose over a 13-year period using a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 11,010). The random intercept cross-lagged panel model revealed unidirectional effects: increases in sense of purpose predicted subsequent increases in openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, as well as decreases in neuroticism. Conversely, changes in personality traits did not predict future changes in sense of purpose. One potential mechanism underlying this effect might involve the link between sense of purpose and optimal self-regulatory processes and outcomes, such as successful planning, goal-directed behaviour, and self-control, which promote gradual positive changes in personality traits. Another plausible mechanism may be the association between purpose and improved subjective well-being and reduced psychological distress, which have been found to predict positive changes in personality traits. These findings challenge previous research that has interpreted cross-sectional associations as evidence that personality traits are predictive of purpose, rather than the other way around. The findings that intentionally cultivating a strong sense of purpose may facilitate positive personality change in adulthood.

Associations between emotional reactivity to stress and adolescent substance use: Differences by sex and valence

Although stress is often related to substance use, it remains unclear whether substance use is related to individual differences in how adolescents respond to stress. Therefore the present study examined associations between substance use and daily emotional reactivity to stress within a year across adolescence. Adolescents (N = 330; Mage = 16.40, SD = 0.74 at study entry; n = 186 female; n = 138 Latine; n = 101 European American; n = 72 Asian American; n = 19 identifying as another ethnicity including African American and Middle Eastern) completed a longitudinal study, including three assessments between the 10th grade and 3-years post-high school. At each assessment, participants reported frequency of alcohol and cannabis use and the number of substances they had ever used. They also completed 15 daily checklists, in which they reported the number of daily arguments and their daily emotion. Multilevel models suggested that more frequent alcohol and cannabis use were related to attenuated positive emotional reactivity to daily stress (i.e., smaller declines in positive emotion on days when they experienced more arguments) for both male and female adolescents. Associations for negative emotional reactivity to stress varied by sex; more frequent alcohol use and use of more substances in one's lifetime were related to greater anxious emotional reactivity to stress among female adolescents, whereas more frequent alcohol and cannabis use and higher lifetime substance use were related to attenuated depressive emotional reactivity to stress among male adolescents. Taken together, substance use was related to emotional reactivity to daily stress within the same year during adolescence, although associations differed by valence and adolescent sex.

Momentary Associations Between Physical Activity, Affect, and Purpose in Life

BACKGROUND

Physical activity is associated with both the hedonic (e.g., affect) and eudaimonic (e.g., purpose in life) aspects of well-being. While there is evidence linking momentary physical activity and affect in daily life, the examination of momentary purpose remains largely unexplored.

PURPOSE

This study investigates the bidirectional associations between physical activity, positive and negative affect, and momentary purpose using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) and accelerometer data.

METHODS

Middle-aged participants (40-70 years old, n = 291) wore accelerometers and completed three daily EMA surveys on momentary experiences for 8 consecutive days. Physical activity (active time and counts) from 20- to 60-min periods before and after EMA surveys were used in the analyses. Multilevel models were adjusted for temporal and contextual factors, age, sex, education, work status, and race/ethnicity.

RESULTS

When participants were more physically active than usual, they reported feeling more purpose-driven and positive affect. Similarly, when participants reported feeling more purpose-driven or experiencing positive affect, they engaged in more physical activity in the subsequent time period. These associations were similar for physical activity from 20- to 60-min periods before and after the EMA survey. Physical activity and negative affect were not related in either direction.

CONCLUSIONS

In middle-aged adults' daily lives, physical activity has bidirectional relations with purpose and positive affect. This study highlights the dynamic associations between physical activity and the positive aspects of both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Future interventions or public health programs should integrate physical activity and mental well-being to maximize mutual benefits.

Purpose in Life as an Explicit Outcome of Occupational Therapy

Purpose in life is increasingly understood to be important to health and well-being. Despite occupational therapy's long history of using occupations to advance health and the linkage between a subclass of occupations and purpose in life, the term is nearly absent from the American Occupational Therapy Association's documents and the profession's empirical literature. We propose that the profession explicitly name purpose in life as among our intervention outcomes and address disruptions of purpose in life in practice. This can be accomplished by first investing in purpose in our own lives, discussing the topic with colleagues and students, identifying possible purpose disruptions in our clients, and using direct or indirect intervention approaches to help clients reconnect to purpose in their lives. By explicitly naming purpose in life as part of the domain of occupational therapy, we become poised to leverage human occupation to address both a broad societal gap and our clients' needs for a renewal of purpose in life.

Purposeful and purposeless aging: Structural issues for sense of purpose and their implications for predicting life outcomes

Despite the value of sense of purpose during older adulthood, this construct often declines with age. With some older adults reconsidering the relevance of purpose later in life, the measurement of purpose may suffer from variance issues with age. The current study investigated whether sense of purpose functions similarly across ages and evaluated if the predictive power of purpose on mental, physical, cognitive, and financial outcomes changes when accounting for a less age-affected measurement structure. Utilizing data from two nationwide panel studies (Health and Retirement Study: n = 14,481; Midlife in the United States: n = 4,030), the current study conducted local structural equation modeling and found two factors for the positively and negatively valenced purpose items in the Purpose in Life subscale (Ryff, 1989), deemed the purposeful and purposeless factor. These factors become less associated with each other at higher ages. When reproducing past findings with this two-factor structure, the current study found that the purposeful and purposeless factors predicted these outcomes in the same direction as would be suggested by past research, but the magnitude of these effects differed for some outcomes. The discussion focuses on the implications of what this means for our understanding of sense of purpose across the lifespan. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Chronic Pain and Affective Experiences Associated with Daily Stressors and Uplifts

People with chronic pain often report greater reactivity to stress than those without pain. This finding is consistent with the kindling hypothesis, which states that continued exposure to stressors only heightens negative affect and dampens positive affect. Yet, people with chronic pain may also respond more positively to enjoyable activities, or uplifts, as well. Chronic pain is related to lower levels of well-being, and the fragility of positive affect model explains how individuals with lower levels of well-being often exhibit stronger, more positive responses to daily uplifts than their less distressed peers. Our study used the National Study of Daily Experiences to assess daily stressors, positive uplifts, and positive and negative affect across eight days among those with and without chronic pain. Participants (nChronicPain=658, nNoPain=1,075) were predominately Non-Hispanic White (91%), 56% female, and averaged 56 years old. Results revealed that people with chronic pain had lower levels of daily positive affect and higher levels of negative affect, yet the two groups did not vary in their stressor-related negative and positive affect. In contrast, having chronic pain was related to a greater increase in positive affect and greater decreases in negative affect on days with positive uplifts. Findings suggest that intervention efforts focusing on uplifts may be particularly helpful for people who report chronic pain.

Events-Affect-Personality: A Daily Diary Investigation of the Mediating Effects of Affect on the Events-Personality Relationship

Our 10-day diary investigation anchored in dynamic personality theories, such as Whole Trait Theory examined (a) whether within-person variability in two broad personality traits Extraversion and Neuroticism is consistently predicted by daily events, (b) whether positive and negative affect, respectively partly mediate this relationship and (c) the lagged relationships between events, and next day variations in affect and personality. Results revealed that personality exhibited significant within-person variability, that positive and negative affect partly mediate the relationship between events and personality, affect accounting for up to 60% of the effects of events on personality. Additionally, we identified that event-affect congruency was accountable for larger effects compared to event-affect non-congruency.

Starting school with purpose: Self-regulatory strategies of first-semester university students

Purposefulness may facilitate self-regulation; however, little is known about the self-regulatory strategies that are implemented by purposeful individuals. Given the multiple regulatory challenges students face in their social and academic lives, a central aim of the current work was to consider how purposefulness and self-regulation are linked during the first semester of university. This 13-week-long study was conducted with first-semester college students (N = 256) in the United States of America to examine whether weekly fluctuations in purposefulness may be connected to the use of traditionally adaptive (problem-solving) and maladaptive (rumination and experiential avoidance) self-regulation strategies. Consistent with our hypothesis, at the within- and between-person level, higher purposefulness was associated with greater use of problem-solving, lower rumination, and lower experiential avoidance at the weekly level. The findings imply purposefulness is an important individual difference that may explain better or worse self-regulatory abilities.

Applying an Allportian Trait Perspective to Sense of Purpose

Sense of purpose captures the extent to which one feels that they have personally meaningful goals and directions guiding them through life. While this construct has illustrated its ability to robustly predict desirable outcomes-ranging from happiness to mortality-the nature of this construct remains unclear. I begin by describing different definitions and measures from the purpose literature. From there, I review the debates suggesting that it should be classified as a component of identity development, a facet of well-being, or even a virtue. In the current paper, I argue that sense of purpose could be best served when qualified as a trait, building from the eight components of defining a trait from Allport's (1931) paper: "What is a trait of personality?". Using this classic piece as a framework, I integrate empirical and theoretical work on purpose and personality to dive into whether sense of purpose is a trait. I conclude by discussing the challenges and implications of bolstering sense of purpose if it is best classified as a trait.

Personality differences in the occurrence and affective correlates of daily positive events

OBJECTIVE

Previous research shows that Neuroticism predicts exposure and affective reactivity to daily stressors. Zautra and colleagues extended this work to daily positive events. Building on these frameworks, we examined the Big Five personality traits as predictors of the occurrence and affective correlates of daily positive events.

METHOD

Participants in two national U.S. daily diary studies (NSDE 2: N = 1,919 and NSDE Refresher: N = 778; aged 25-84) reported daily positive events, emotions specific to the events, and daily affect for 8 consecutive days.

RESULTS

In parallel analyses in both samples, Extraversion and in the NSDE Refresher sample only Openness (but not Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, or Agreeableness) predicted more frequent positive event occurrence. All Big Five traits were associated with one or more emotional experiences (e.g., calm, proud) during positive events. Neuroticism predicted greater event-related positive affect in the NSDE 2 sample, whereas Agreeableness was related to more event-related negative affect in the NSDE Refresher sample.

CONCLUSIONS

The Big Five personality traits each provided unique information for predicting positive events in daily life. The discussion centers on potential explanations and implications for advancing the understanding of individual differences that contribute to engagement in positive experiences.

Purposefulness and daily life in a pandemic: Predicting daily affect and physical symptoms during the first weeks of the COVID-19 response

OBJECTIVE

Sense of purpose has been associated with greater health and well-being, even in daily contexts. However, it is unclear whether effects would hold in daily life during COVID-19, when people may have difficulty seeing a path towards their life goals.

DESIGN

The current study investigated whether purposefulness predicted daily positive affect, negative affect, and physical symptoms. Participants (n = 831) reported on these variables during the first weeks of the COVID-19 response in North America.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Participants completed daily surveys asking them for daily positive events, stressors, positive affect, negative affect, physical symptoms, and purposefulness.

RESULTS

Purposefulness at between- and within-person levels predicted less negative affect and physical symptoms, but more positive affect at the daily level. Between-person purposefulness interacted with positive events when predicting negative and positive affect, suggesting that purposeful people may be less reactive to positive events. However, between-person purposefulness also interacted with daily stressors, insofar that stressors predicted greater declines in positive affect for purposeful people.

CONCLUSION

Being a purposeful person holds positive implications for daily health and well-being, even during the pandemic context. However, purposefulness may hold some consequences unique to the COVID-19 context, which merit attention in future research.