Alex Grattery

Date of Award

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Cottrell, Catherine

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

Goal disengagement, which is when one stops trying to achieve a goal they have, has been shown to lead to positive outcomes such as increased cognitive capabilities and lower stress in some circumstances. One such circumstance is when one has goals they cannot feasibly achieve but still work towards. Compassionate goals are goals that have the purpose of helping others. This type of goal has been shown to benefit life satisfaction, social functioning, and relational outcomes. No research has been done examining the relationship between these two goal types. The current study collected an online sample of 121 participants to find if goal disengagement and goal compassion, as well as the interaction of these variables, related to participants’ expectations for emotional experiences. First, participants wrote about a goal and filled out a scale determining the level of compassion motivations they had for that goal. Participants were split up into three conditions: goal importance, goal disengagement, and control. Participants then completed a happiness and relaxation scale, which assessed how they expected to feel if they achieved their goal, and a desire mood scale asking how much overall state desire they felt at the current moment. A significant interaction between goal compassion and goal disengagement was found for happiness, but not relaxation. Goal compassion affected the degree to which goal disengagement predicted happiness expectations; a positive relationship of goal compassion with expected happiness was found in the goal disengagement condition, and this correlation was found to be significantly more positive than those for the other two conditions. The search for a happier self and personality differences, specifically the difference in the level of self- and other-interest between participants with selfish and compassionate goals, were cited as possible mechanisms to explain this result. These findings suggest that goal compassion can modify the effects of goal disengagement. For full data, code, and thesis, visit https://osf.io/hn5p6/.

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