Sustainable development requires individuals to make mindful, long-term choices that preserve the planet for future generations. Becoming a sustainable citizen involves awareness, responsibility, and a commitment to long-term thinking-qualities that rely heavily on self-control. Although self-control is a limited resource, it can be trained and applied across various domains, contributing to healthier lifestyles and reduced environmental impact. Yet, this ideal faces strong resistance in societies that prioritize immediate gratification, consumerism, and comfort. Bridging the gap between sustainable intentions and actual behavior requires supportive social, educational, and institutional frameworks as proposed by the conceptual model of the two-way dynamics of sustainable citizenship. By fostering environments that make self-discipline easier and more meaningful, individual actions can eventually lead to collective change and the redefinition of societal norms. This suggests that effective sustainability policies should combine individual self-control interventions with structural changes that reduce the cognitive burden of pro-environmental choices.

Murayama and Jach offer valuable suggestions for how to integrate computational processes into motivation theory, but these processes cannot do away with motivation altogether. Rewards are only rewarding because people want and like them - that is, because of motivation. Sexual desire is not primarily a quest for rewarding information. Elucidating the interface between motivation and cognition seems a promising way forward.

The deterministic 'clockwork universe' ideas from bygone centuries have been rendered obsolete by advances in science, philosophy, and psychology. The ancient theoretical problem of free will should, therefore, be reframed for existential positive psychology by understanding the agentic powers of the human mind. The existential emphasis on conscious experience and choice constrained by circumstances offers a promising framework for understanding human agency. Freedom is relative rather than absolute and rooted in situational structure. The human mind evolved to capitalize on situational freedoms and possibilities. These include mental time travel to past and future, recognizing alternative possibilities, conscious decision processes, and more. The existentialist view of the human being as a conscious agent negotiating complex social situations defined by multiple possibilities is a stronger basis for positive psychology than the outmoded view of humans as automatons carrying out scripts predetermined by relentless physical causality.

Although many women report being victimized by gossip, fewer report spreading negative gossip. Female gossipers might be unaware they are gossiping if they disclose such statements out of concern for targets. Four studies (N = 1709) investigated whether women believe their gossip is motivated by concern and whether expressing concern for targets insulates female gossipers against social costs, while simultaneously impairing targets' reputations. Study 1 examined sex differences in gossip motivations. Compared to men, women endorsed stronger concern than harm motivations, especially when gossiping about other women, suggesting these motivations characterize female intrasexual gossip. In Study 2, female gossipers who phrased their negative gossip with concern (versus maliciously or neutrally) were evaluated as more trustworthy and desirable as social and romantic partners. Study 3 replicated the favorable evaluations of concerned female gossipers. Female participants especially disliked malicious female gossipers, suggesting professions of concern might help to avoid women's scorn. Male participants reported lower romantic interest in female gossip targets when they learned concern (versus malicious or no) gossip, suggesting concerned gossip can harm female targets' romantic prospects. Study 4 revealed these patterns extend to face-to-face interactions. A female gossiper was preferred as a social partner when she phrased her gossip with concern versus maliciously. Moreover, concerned gossip harmed perceptions of the female target as effectively as malicious gossip. Altogether, findings suggest that negative gossip delivered with concern effectively harms female targets' reputations, while also protecting gossipers' reputations, indicating a viable strategy in female intrasexual competition.

If people often mate assortatively by traits, individuals will be more likely to attract mates with desirable attributes if they also possess those same attributes. Thus, individuals should value and advertise attributes in themselves to appeal to potential mates' preferences (intersexual motivations) and to attract mates with attributes they desire (assortative motivations). Because these two motivations are often conflated, extant research might underestimate sex differences in trait preferences. Across three pre-registered online studies (NS1 = 196, NS2 = 179, NS3 = 831 MTurkers), we applied a novel technique- self-versus-mate tradeoffs-to disentangle these competing motivations for six traits: attractiveness, intelligence, ambition, wealth, humor, and kindness. When forced to trade off possessing a trait oneself against having mates with that trait, larger sex differences emerged. Men more strongly valued partner (versus own) attractiveness and own (versus partner) intelligence, wealth, and ambition. Women more strongly valued partner (versus own) humor. Tradeoffs did not reveal sex differences in kindness, perhaps because women more strongly valued their own and partner kindness. Tradeoff items enhanced prediction of participant sex, beyond isolated motivations, revealing incremental explanatory value. These results suggest assortative motivations might inflate the apparent similarity between the sexes in desires to be attractive, ambitious, wealthy, intelligent, and humorous.

Moffett's definition of societies could be augmented by recognizing society's organizing systems that coordinate diverse individuals' behavior for collective good. Viewing humans as cultural animals indicates three reasons for ever larger societies: More shared information, bigger and better marketplace for exchange, and military superiority in numbers. Sports teams are societies offering a promising venue for empirical work.

Research on ego depletion and mental fatigue (ED/MF) show that physical performance can be impaired by mental processes. Exciting directions for future research include mapping different effects of ED/MF on effort vs. skill aspects of sport, given that effort is directly controllable but skill relies on automatic, overlearned processes. Weakened attention control could contribute to both problems. Impairments of decision-making during competition could lead to indecision and status quo bias, selfish play rather than team play, and certain types of mistakes. Flow states and positive affect may counteract ED/MF. Physical training, self-control training, and mental practice may all help.

This investigation elucidates what makes a good working life. A sample of 678 employees from diverse jobs rated their job satisfaction, work meaningfulness, and work psychological richness, as well as several key work characteristics (both stressors and resources) and important work and life outcomes. We explored the unique contributions of satisfaction, meaningfulness, and psychological richness by controlling each measure for the other two. Job satisfaction correlates were consistent with previous work, namely stressors and negative outcomes correlated negatively, whereas resources and positive outcomes correlated positively. More surprisingly, psychological richness was positively correlated with both stressors and resources, as well as with high rates of feeling exhausted after work and with thoughts of changing jobs. Meaningfulness, meanwhile, had relatively weak correlates after controlling for psychological richness and satisfaction. The strongest were with being proficient at the job, being highly engaged with it, and coping well with changes affecting the work role.

We identify points of conflict and consensus regarding (a) controversial empirical claims and (b) normative preferences for how controversial scholarship—and scholars—should be treated. In 2021, we conducted qualitative interviews ( n = 41) to generate a quantitative survey ( N = 470) of U.S. psychology professors’ beliefs and values. Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, a pattern that could bias perceived scientific consensus regarding the inaccuracy of controversial conclusions. Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired. Most professors opposed suppressing scholarship and punishing peers on the basis of moral concerns about research conclusions and reported contempt for peers who petition to retract papers on moral grounds. Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship. These results do not resolve empirical or normative disagreements among psychology professors, but they may provide an empirical context for their discussion.

Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving ...Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In ...

Abstract Befitting the focus of the book series, this chapter highlights some key roles of free will theory within positive psychology. Free will is among the most advanced capabilities of the human mind and is integral to most forms of flourishing. Indeed, contrary to widespread impressions that creativity is something purely in the unconscious mind, experiments have shown that conscious thinking and reflection are vital to the creative process. Proper exercise of free will increases happiness, and indeed people who believe more in free will also report higher happiness and higher meaningfulness in life.

Abstract Free will presumably evolved to enable people to improve their lives, reflected in benefits for survival and reproduction. But sometimes people do self-destructive things. Contrary to the Freudian view of innate self-destructive tendencies, there is scant evidence that normal people ever seek harm or failure for themselves. They do however make self-destructive trade-offs, typically seeking a positive immediate reward that happens to come with a serious but delayed cost. Another pathway into self-defeat is that faulty knowledge about self and world causes people to pursue good outcomes in ways that backfire and thwart their efforts. Self-defeating actions occur in connection with threats to reputation, emotional distress, and failures of self-control. Free will is generally used to bring benefits to the self, but sometimes people go about this in ways that end up hurting themselves.

Abstract Most animals live in the immediate here and now, but humans have a greatly extended awareness of past and future. Being able to imagine various future outcomes, including how present actions would produce them, and to use those thoughts as input into current action, is an important increase in freedom. Another advantage of the human awareness of time is being able to understand oneself and one’s actions in narrative form: The present action is part of a story, with meaningful relations to both past and future. Free will enables the pursuit of enlightened self-interest, especially doing what will be best in the long run even if it is not the most appealing in the immediate present.

An important body of literature suggests that exerting intense cognitive effort causes mental fatigue and can lead to unhealthy behaviors such as indulging in high-calorie food and taking drugs. Whereas this effect has been mostly explained in terms of weakening cognitive control, cognitive effort may also bias behavioral choices by amplifying the hedonic and emotional impact of rewards. We report parallel findings with animals and humans supporting this hypothesis. In rats, exerting cognitive effort immediately before access to cocaine self-administration significantly increased drug intake. In addition, exerting cognitive effort increased the psychostimulant effect of cocaine. The effects of cognitive effort on addiction-related behaviors were eliminated and even reversed when animals could rest in their home-cage for 2-4 h before access to cocaine self-administration. Among humans, we found that expending cognitive effort increased consumption of tasty (but unhealthy) food by increasing the hedonic enjoyment of consuming the food. In addition, the effects were specific for emotionally relevant stimuli (i.e. food rewards) and did not generalize to judgment about neutral objects. Altogether these data suggest that intense cognitive effort can increase the perceived intensity of rewards and lead to their overconsumption. This effect may contribute to bad decision making induced by excessive cognitive effort and make people more vulnerable to indulge in unhealthy behaviors such as use of addictive drugs.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Correction StatementThis article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Additional informationFundingThe author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Ego depletion theory proposes that self-regulation depends on a limited energy resource (willpower). The simple initial theory has been refined to emphasize conservation rather than resource exhaustion, extended to encompass decision making, planning, and initiative, and linked to physical bodily energy (glucose). Recent challenges offered alternative explanations (which have largely failed) and questioned replicability (which has now been well established). Methods have improved, particularly with emphasis on longer, stronger manipulations to ensure fatigue. New work extends ego depletion into workplace settings and sports. Interpersonal conflict may be both a major cause and consequence. New questions include the possibility of chronic ego depletion (e.g., in burnout), protective factors and coping strategies, individual differences, and recovery processes.

Hostile political conflict is one of the paramount stories of modern society, with the left and right coalescing into opposing tribes more concerned with defeating each other than advancing society. A serious effort in this chapter to understand both sides as they themselves see the world concludes that the left and right have grown apart because of emphasizing different but essential ingredients to societal success. Cultural animal theory emphasizes that human traits result from biological adaptations to make culture possible. To succeed, cultural systems must create more resources than solitary individuals and share them through the group. In the modern world, the political left focuses on sharing (redistribution) while the political right focuses on amassing resources (growth and preservation). These two essential tasks have come to favor opposing policies, such as when growth depends on a market economy that works by incentives and therefore inevitably creates inequality. Differences in moral values, attitudes, vote-pandering strategies, and more follow from this basic difference.

Possibilities are deeply engrained in psychology’s attempts to understand human behavior. This special issue offers diverse and novel insights into the role of possibilities. Two articles on morality show surprising links to mental illness and to counterfactual outcomes: People think doing immoral things is a sign of mental illness, and morally unwelcome outcomes stimulate retroactive imputation of more alternatives. Three articles address classic questions of determinism and choice: Possibilities are shaped by prior events, but pure determinism is useless for psychological theory, and meanwhile some perspectives in modern physics clash with psychological observations and experience. Imitation promotes prosociality but people are highly selective as to what they imitate.

Abstract Inspecting the evidence on how conscious thoughts cause behavior reveals some clear limitations. There is no proof that action begins with conscious thoughts, nor that conscious thoughts have immediate or direct influence on moving the muscles. Conscious thinking occurs in between input (information reaching the brain) and output (moving the body). Conscious thoughts are especially useful in translating broad, abstract goals into specific plans and actions. They operate best in situations defined by multiple alternative possibilities, such as difficult decisions. They enable one’s actions to be influenced by other people and indeed by the culture. They integrate past, present, and future. They help the automatic mind learn to function better, such as by forming good habits and practicing skills. Sometimes conscious thoughts involve reconsidering and overriding automatic responses and impulses.

Pragmatic prospection is the ability to think deeply about the future in order to identify and to work productively toward goals. It involves imagining desirable future outcomes, setting sensible goals, making plans, and flexibly executing those plans. We conducted an exploratory survey of full-time working U.S. adults (N = 1541), measuring pragmatic prospection along with life- and job-related outcomes. All data from the present survey are publicly available. Pragmatic prospection correlated positively with positive outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction, work productivity), correlated negatively with negative outcomes (e.g., anxiety, depression), and tracked with other adaptive personality traits associated with achievement and psychological adjustment (e.g., high conscientiousness, low neuroticism). These results point to pragmatic prospection as an important component of flourishing, both in the workplace and in daily life.