Abstract
Objective: Theory and research suggest that the pursuit of personal goals that do not fit a person's affect-based implicit motives results in impaired emotional well-being, including increased symptoms of depression. The aim of this study was to evaluate an intervention designed to enhance motive-goal congruence and study its impact on well-being.Method: Seventy-four German students (mean age = 22.91, SD = 3.68; 64.9% female) without current psychopathology, randomly allocated to three groups: motivational feedback (FB; n = 25; participants learned about the fit between their implicit motives and explicit goals), FB + congruence-enhancement training (CET; n = 22; participants also engaged in exercises to increase the fit between their implicit motives and goals), and a no-intervention control group (n = 27), were administered measures of implicit motives, personal goal commitments, happiness, depressive symptoms, and life satisfaction 3 weeks before (T1) and 6 weeks after (T2) treatment.Results: On two types of congruence measures derived from motive and goal assessments, treated participants showed increases in agentic (power and achievement) congruence, with improvements being most consistent in the FB+CET group. Treated participants also showed a trend-level depressive symptom reduction, but no changes on other well-being measures. Although increases in overall and agentic motivational congruence were associated with increases in affective well-being, treatment-based reduction of depressive symptoms was not mediated by treatment-based agentic congruence changes.Conclusion: These findings document that motivational congruence can be effectively enhanced, that changes in motivational congruence are associated with changes in affective well-being, and they suggest that individuals' implicit motives should be considered when personal goals are discussed in the therapeutic process.
Highlights
Research conducted over the past two decades supports the notion that implicit motives, that is, dispositional capacities for experiencing certain classes of incentives as pleasurable and certain classes of disincentives as aversive, represent an important source of emotional well-being (Brunstein, 2010; Schultheiss and Köllner, in press)
A largescale study with over 300 participants demonstrated that the goals that people set for themselves and that they identify with in their daily lives likewise do not converge with their implicit motives, but instead with their explicit, self-attributed motives (Rawolle et al, 2013; see King, 1995), which appear to influence personal goal choices
Participants were randomly allocated to a control group (CG; n = 26) a feedback group (FB, n = 26) and a feedback with congruence-enhancement training group (FB+congruenceenhancement training (CET); n = 25)
Summary
Research conducted over the past two decades supports the notion that implicit motives, that is, dispositional capacities for experiencing certain classes of incentives as pleasurable and certain classes of disincentives as aversive, represent an important source of emotional well-being (Brunstein, 2010; Schultheiss and Köllner, in press). A growing number of studies show that emotional well-being is high in individuals who pursue and realize personal goals that fit their implicit motives (i.e., that are congruent with them), whereas emotional well-being is impaired in those who fail to realize such goals or pursue goals that do not fit their motives (i.e., that are incongruent with them; e.g., (Brunstein et al, 1998); for recent reviews, see Brunstein, 2010; Thrash et al, 2012; Hofer and Busch, 2013; Schultheiss and Köllner, 2014). We describe an intervention that aims at making individuals aware of the (lack of) congruence between their personal goals and their implicit motives, provides them with tools to increase motivational congruence, and examines the impact of these interventions longitudinally on changes in motivational congruence and affective and cognitive well-being
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