Research
Our research deals with the conditions, processes and consequences of self-regulation and goal pursuit in various contexts like school, university or health. People come into these contexts with their own characteristics (e.g., personality traits, self-regulatory competencies, goals and motives). Depending on interactions between characteristics of person and context, self-regulation may succeed or fail, whereas the latter may cause negative consequences for the individual and for society. This is the case if, for example, overweight, underachievement in school, university or at work, or decreases in well-being result from such failures. It is the goal of our research to gather and extend our psychological knowledge about the processes causing such problems and to develop theoretically and empirically sound solutions.Specific research projects deal with the following subjects:
Flexibility in the use of self-control strategies
Sebastian Bürgler
Self-control conflicts are conflicts in which a person has to initiate or persist in an aversive task or resist a temptation in order to reach personal goals. To accomplish this, people can use a wide variety of self-control strategies (such as thinking about the positive or negative consequences, enriching the task with something pleasant, set specific goals and many more). In this context, is flexibility in the use of strategies important for successfully resolving self-control conflicts? Specifically, three components of flexibility are of interest: The context-sensitive selection of a strategy, the repertoire of different strategies a person uses, and the monitoring of feedback regarding the efficacy of a chosen strategy.
Cooperation with:
Prof. Dr. Veronika Brandstätter (Universität Zürich)
Prof. Dr. Rick Hoyle (Duke University)
Project funding:
Swiss National Science Foundation
Measuring goals – analysis of current practices and development of a new measure
Goals represent a central construct in the analysis of human motivation. How people appraise different goal dimensions like difficulty or importance has substantial influence on goal attainment and well-being. Nevertheless, there is disagreement about how goal dimensions should be measured. By literature review, we found goal dimensions being measured with up to 52 different item wordings, while some wordings were used for measuring several goal dimensions. This diversity of measures hinders the comparability of study results. Within the framework of our research project we want to get an overview about current measurement practices and derive solutions for a more standardized assessment of goals. Based upon this we will develop a new measurement instrument.
Underlying mechanisms of the ego depletion phenomenon
Exerting effort in an initial task often results in individuals showing reduced self-control performance in subsequent tasks – this phenomenon has been coined the "ego depletion" phenomenon. But what explains this self-control failure? Do people fail in self-control because they run short of a self-control resource or because they lack motivation to engage in the subsequent task?
Cooperation with:
Prof. Dr. David Loschelder (Leuphana University of Lüneburg)
Prof. Dr. Malte Friese (Saarland University)
Approach- and avoidance motivation
Goals ca be directed towards positive end-states (approach goals, e.g., passing an exam) or towards negative end-states (avoidance goals, e.g., not failing an exam). What are the consequences for the experience of goal-related means, that is, for the goal-directed activities (e.g., studying) whether their goal is an approach goal or an avoidance goal? How can we explain intra- and individual differences in the extent to which a person thinks, feels, and acts in an approach- or in an avoidance motivated manner?
Cooperation with:
Prof. Dr. Veronika Brandstätter (Universität Zürich)
Prof. Dr. Andrew J. Elliot (University of Rochester, USA)
Dr. Annette Brose (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Project funding:
Swiss National Science Foundation
German Research Foundation