# overview
My research aims to understand how people answer the "big" questions in life and how people's answers to those questions influence their attitudes and behavior. Our lab formulates and tests a wide range of hypotheses related to many types of existential concerns focusing on the antecedents and consequences of the experience of meaning in life, authenticity, self-alienation, perceptions of free-will, and mortality awareness.

# educationAndTraining[].organization.label
University of Missouri - (Columbia, Missouri, United States)

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Disassociating the Agent From the Self: Undermining Belief in Free Will Diminishes True Self-Knowledge

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The Role of Positive Affect and Individual Differences in Intuition in the Accuracy of Pattern Recognition

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Civic Hope and the Perceived Authenticity of Democratic Participation

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Religious commitment and positive mood as information about meaning in life

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Does expertise matter in replication? An examination of the reproducibility project: Psychology

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Is the Illusion of Authenticity Beneficial? Merely Perceiving Decisions as Guided by the True Self Enhances Decision Satisfaction

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Alcohol cues, expectancies, and the working self-concept

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To belong is to matter: sense of belonging enhances meaning in life.

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Investing in the real me: Preference for experiential to material purchases driven by the motivation to search for true self-knowledge

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Alcohol primes, expectancies, and the working self-concept.

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Ghosts, UFOs, and magic: positive affect and the experiential system.

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Free Will, Counterfactual Reflection, and the Meaningfulness of Life Events

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Understanding the Relationship Between Perceived Authenticity and Well-Being

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Experiential appreciation as a pathway to meaning in life.

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Experiencing versus contemplating: Language use during descriptions of awe and wonder.

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Alcohol expectancy priming and drinking behavior: the role of compatibility between prime and expectancy content.

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Positive mood and social relatedness as information about meaning in life

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Approaching the true self: Promotion focus predicts the experience of authenticity

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Judgments of Meaning in Life, Religious Beliefs, and the Experience of Cognitive (Dis)Fluency.

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Frontal asymmetry and alcohol cue reactivity: Influence of core personality systems.

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Reflections on the Scientific Study of Meaning in Life

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Narrating the Self in the Past and the Future: Implications for Maturity

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Emotions and Meaning in Life: A Motivational Perspective

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The relationship between alcohol cues, alcohol expectancies, and physical balance.

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Thinking about a new decade in life increases personal self-reflection: A replication and reinterpretation of Alter and Hershfield's (2014) findings.

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Meaning-Making, Psychological Distress, and the Experience of Meaning in Life Following a Natural Disaster

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Guilty, but not ashamed: "true" self-conceptions influence affective responses to personal shortcomings.

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THE ROLE OF PERCEIVED AUTHENTICITY IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RECOVERY FROM COLLECTIVE TRAUMA

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Thine own self: true self-concept accessibility and meaning in life.

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True self-alienation positively predicts reports of mindwandering.

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Trajectories of Affective Balance 1 Year After Traumatic Injury: Associations with Resilience, Social Support, and Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

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Investigating Variation in Replicability A "Many Labs'' Replication Project

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HAPPINESS, PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH, AND FUTURE TIME PERSPECTIVE

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Maintaining hope at the 11th hour: authenticity buffers the effect of limited time perspective on hope.

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A Cross-Cultural Validation of the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT) Results From Ten Countries Across Three Continents

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Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal

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The association between vivid thoughts of death and authenticity

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The Illusion of Time: Testing the Bidirectional Relationship Between Belief in Free Will and Temporal Horizons

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Evaluation of Migrating Corrosion Inhibitors Used in the Restoration and Repair of Reinforced Concrete Structures

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Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings

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Subliminal mere exposure and explicit and implicit positive affective responses.

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Authenticity and self-esteem across temporal horizons

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Meaning in life and seeing the big picture: Positive affect and global focus

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Detecting and constructing meaning in life events

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Heavy drinking, impulsivity and attentional narrowing following alcohol cue exposure.

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Narrowing of attention following food cue exposure in emerging adults: Does impulsivity matter?

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An international study on psychological coping during COVID-19: Towards a meaning-centered coping style.

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Awe and meaning: Elucidating complex effects of awe experiences on meaning in life

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The dynamic interplay between perceived true self-knowledge and decision satisfaction.

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Interactive effects of alcohol outcome expectancies and alcohol cues on nonconsumptive behavior.

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Existential Ennui: Examining the Reciprocal Relationship Between Self-Alienation and Academic Amotivation

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Theory Building Through Replication Response to Commentaries on the "Many Labs" Replication Project

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Positive affect, meaning in life, and future time perspective: an application of socioemotional selectivity theory.

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Parental bereavement and the loss of purpose in life as a function of interdependent self-construal.

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Bristol Insomnia Group: has it made a difference after 10 years?

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Lost and found possible selves: Goals, development, and wellbeing

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Motivating the academic mind: High-level construal of academic goals enhances goal meaningfulness, motivation, and self-concordance

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The Reciprocal Relationship Between Perceptions of Moral Goodness and Knowledge of Others' True Selves

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The True Self and Psychological Health: Emerging Evidence and Future Directions

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Supervisory control system and frontal asymmetry: neurophysiological traits of emotion-based impulsivity.

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Judgments of Meaning in Life Following an Existential Crisis

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Feeling like you know who you are: perceived true self-knowledge and meaning in life.

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Physical activity self-definitions: Comparing the weights of the predictors across different physical activities

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Positive affect and the experience of meaning in life.

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Meaning in Life as a Subjective Judgment and a Lived Experience

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Companion Versus Comparison: Examining Seeking Social Companionship or Social Comparison as Characteristics That Differentiate Happy and Unhappy People.

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APPROACH MOTIVATION CAUSES "VIRTUAL" ALCOHOL MYOPIA: TRAIT APPROACH AND GREATER LEFT-FRONTAL ACTIVATION PREDICT ATTENTIONAL NARROWING

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Family as a salient source of meaning in young adulthood

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Meaning in Life and Pain: The Differential Effects of Coherence, Purpose, and Mattering on Pain Severity, Frequency, and the Development of Chronic Pain.

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Authentic for Thee But Not for Me: Perceived Authenticity in Self-Control Conflicts.

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The Human Quest for Meaning, Theories, Research, and Applications

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IMPULSIVITY ENHANCES LEFT-FRONTAL ACTIVATION TO ALCOHOL CUES

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Introduction to the Special Issue: Authenticity: Novel Insights Into a Valued, Yet Elusive, Concept

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Use of UV Spectroscopy for Detecting Migrating Corrosion Inhibitor Depth in Concrete

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Positive affect, intuition, and feelings of meaning.

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Whatever happened to "What might have been"? Regrets, happiness, and maturity.

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The subjective quality of episodic future thought and the experience of meaning in life

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Social threats, happiness, and the dynamics of meaning in life judgments.

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Happiness begets children? Evidence for a bi-directional link between well-being and number of children

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Marijuana primes, marijuana expectancies, and arithmetic efficiency.

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Daily mental lapses and the subjective experience of true self-alienation

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Attitudes and Motivations of Owners Who Enroll Pets in Pet Life-Care Centers

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Rational Versus Experiential Processing of Negative Feedback Reduces Defensiveness but Induces Ego Depletion

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Straying From the Righteous Path and From Ourselves: The Interplay Between Perceptions of Morality and Self-Knowledge.

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Developing a Quadripartite Existential Meaning Scale and Exploring the Internal Structure of Meaning in Life

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Can Affectively Negative Experiences Contribute to Well-Being? The Affectively Negative Need-Fulfillment Model

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Positive affect, intuition and referential thinking

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Interactive effects of approach motivational intensity and alcohol cues on the scope of perceptual attention.

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Expecting innovation: psychoactive drug primes and the generation of creative solutions.

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Death, life, scarcity, and value: an alternative perspective on the meaning of death.

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Following one's true self and the sacredness of cultural values

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Positive and Existential Psychological Approaches to the Experience of Meaning in Life

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Rational Versus Experiential Processing of Negative Feedback Reduces Defensiveness but Induces Ego Depletion

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When being far away is good: Exploring how mortality salience, regulatory mode, and goal progress affect judgments of meaning in life

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Many Labs 3: Evaluating participant pool quality across the academic semester via replication

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Ease of retrieval effects on estimates of predicted alcohol use

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The Experience of Meaning in Life Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversies

# streetAddress
Texas A&M University; Psychology; 4235 TAMU

# etdChairOf[].label
Kim, Jinhyung (2018-08). In Pursuit of Existential Meaning: Motivation to Search for Meaning Facilitates Experiential Purchases Over Material Purchases. Doctoral Dissertation.

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Kim, Jinhyung (2018-07). In Pursuit of Existential Meaning: Motivation to Search for Meaning Facilitates Experiential Purchases Over Material Purchases. Doctoral Dissertation.

# etdChairOf[].label
Seto, Elizabeth (2017-05). The Interplay of True Self-Knowledge on Belief in Free Will and Moral Outcomes. Doctoral Dissertation.

# etdChairOf[].label
Davis, William Edward (2015-04). Making Sense and Making Fun: Humor in the Context of Situational Meaning Making and Global Meaning. Doctoral Dissertation.