Dealing with Stuff
High Self-Control Individuals Prefer Meaning Over Pleasure
Katharina Bernecker, Daniela Becker & Aiste Guobyte
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The link between self-control and success in various life domains is often explained by people avoiding hedonic pleasures, such as through inhibition, making the right choices, or using adaptive strategies. We propose an additional explanation: High self-control individuals prefer spending time on meaningful activities rather than pleasurable ones, whereas the opposite is true for individuals with high trait hedonic capacity. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants either imagined (N = 449) or actually engaged in activities (N = 231, pre-registered) during unexpected free time. They then rated their experience. In both studies, trait self-control was positively related to the eudaimonic experience (e.g., meaning) of activities and unrelated to their hedonic experience (e.g., pleasure). The opposite was true for trait hedonic capacity. Study 2 (N = 248) confirmed these findings using a repeated-choice paradigm. The preference for eudaimonic over hedonic experiences may be a key aspect of successful long-term goal pursuit.
Generational Shifts in Adolescent Mental Health: A Longitudinal Time-Lag Study
Meghan Borg, Taylor Heffer & Teena Willoughby
Journal of Youth and Adolescence, April 2025, Pages 837-848
Abstract:
There is concern that adolescents today are experiencing a “mental health crisis” compared to previous generations. Research has lacked a longitudinal time-lag design to directly compare depressive symptoms and social anxiety of adolescents in two generations. The current study surveyed 1081 adolescents in the current generation (Mage = 14.60, SD = 0.31, 49% female) and 1211 adolescents in a previous generation (Mage = 14.40, SD = 0.51, 51% female) across the high school years (grades 9–12), 20 years apart. Mixed-effects analysis revealed that the Current-Sample reported higher and increasing mental health problems over time compared to the Past-Sample. Although most adolescents reported consistently low mental health problems, the Current-Sample had a higher proportion of adolescents who were consistently at risk across the high school years compared to the Past-Sample. These findings highlight while most adolescents in both generations do not report elevated mental health problems, there may be a small, yet growing, group of adolescents today at risk for experiencing a “mental health crisis”.
Lonely days: Linking day-to-day loneliness to biological and functional aging
Stephanie Wilson & Rachel Koffer
Health Psychology, May 2025, Pages 446-455
Method: Adults who participated in the National Study of Daily Experiences and Biomarker Project of the Midlife in the United States study (N = 1,008) reported their daily loneliness on eight consecutive evenings, provided blood samples assayed for interleukin (IL)-6 and insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), and completed assessments of gait speed and grip strength. Self-reports captured difficulties with instrumental activities of daily living, demographics, health conditions, and trait measures of depression and social connection.
Results: Contrary to its traditional treatment as a trait, loneliness varied substantially day to day (intraclass correlation coefficient = .57). Controlling for age, gender, comorbidities, body mass index, education, and time between projects, higher daily loneliness was associated with lower IGF-1, weaker grip, slower gait, and more self-reported functional limitations. Those who were more susceptible to daily loneliness also had higher IL-6 and slower gait. Trait measures of social connection did not predict these outcomes, and daily loneliness measures were largely robust to the effects of depression.
The Hidden Cost of Decision-Making Autonomy at Work: How Task Reflexivity and Construal Level Induce Mental Fatigue
Hun Whee Lee et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Contrary to the traditional belief that decision-making autonomy enhances employee well-being, we investigate the cognitive circumstances and mechanisms through which daily decision-making autonomy leads to mental fatigue. Integrating self-regulation theory with construal-level theory, we propose that daily decision-making autonomy triggers cognitive activities related to task reflexivity, which subsequently results in next-day mental fatigue. We identify trait construal level as a key moderating factor, arguing that the indirect effect of decision-making autonomy on mental fatigue through task reflexivity is particularly pronounced when employees have a low (vs. high) trait construal level. Our hypotheses received support from two experience sampling studies in the United States and China. Specifically, we found that the detrimental effects of decision-making autonomy are indirect by nature and only manifest in certain employees.
Sleep selectively and durably enhances memory for the sequence of real-world experiences
Nicholas Diamond et al.
Nature Human Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Sleep is thought to play a critical role in the retention of memory for past experiences (episodic memory), reducing the rate of forgetting compared with wakefulness. Yet it remains unclear whether and how sleep actively transforms the way we remember multidimensional real-world experiences, and how such memory transformation unfolds over the days, months and years that follow. In an exception to the law of forgetting, we show that sleep actively and selectively improves the accuracy of memory for a one-time, real-world experience (an art tour) -- specifically boosting memory for the order of tour items (sequential associations) versus perceptual details from the tour (featural associations). This above-baseline boost in sequence memory was not evident after a matched period of wakefulness. Moreover, the preferential retention of sequence relative to featural memory observed after a night’s sleep grew over time up to 1 year post-encoding. Finally, overnight polysomnography showed that sleep-related memory enhancement was associated with the duration and neurophysiological hallmarks of slow-wave sleep previously linked to sequential neural replay, particularly spindle–slow wave coupling. These results suggest that sleep serves a crucial and selective role in enhancing sequential organization in our memory for past events at the expense of perceptual details, linking sleep-related neural mechanisms to the days-to-years-long transformation of memory for complex real-life experiences.