We present two openly accessible databases related to the assessment of implicit motives using Picture Story Exercises (PSEs): (a) A database of 183,415 German sentences, nested in 26,389 stories provided by 4,570 participants, which have been coded by experts using Winter’s coding system for the implicit affiliation/intimacy, achievement, and power motives, and (b) a database of 54 classic and new pictures which have been used as PSE stimuli. Updated picture norms are provided which can be used to select appropriate pictures for PSE applications. Based on an analysis of the relations between raw motive scores, word count, and sentence count, we give recommendations on how to control motive scores for story length, and validate the recommendation with a meta-analysis on gender differences in the implicit affiliation motive that replicates existing findings. We discuss to what extent the guiding principles of the story length correction can be generalized to other content coding systems for narrative material. Several potential applications of the databases are discussed, including (un)supervised machine learning of text content, psychometrics, and better reproducibility of PSE research.

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self-regulation. Coping with obstacles first requires those obstacles to be identified. The purpose of the present studies was to apply an inter-individual approach to this important, but insufficiently studied self-regulatory aspect of goal striving. We therefore examined the role of self-awareness, that is, paying attention to one's own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, for the identification of goal-related obstacles. We measured and manipulated self-awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of dispositional and situational self-awareness identify more obstacles, both with regard to their idiosyncratic personal goals (Studies 1 and 2) and with regard to a goal in an assigned task during an experiment (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicate that self-awareness plays a crucial role for identifying obstacles. We discuss the implications of our findings for personality and self-regulation research.

As people age, they experience typical age-graded challenges and opportunities, for example, their own retirement, changes in their social networks, or a decline in health condition. The extent to which people successfully process, respond to, and act on these challenges and opportunities is highly important for their health, at the core of which the WHO sees the possibility of “doing what one has reason to value.” In this article, we posit that individuals can play an active role in determining whether they can, in response to these age-graded influences, continue doing what they have reason to value, and that they can do so by deploying the self-regulatory processes of goal setting (including re-engagement in new goals after disengaging from a previous goal), goal pursuit, and goal disengagement. We discuss the role of these self-regulatory processes in three important goal domains: work/retirement, interpersonal relationships, and health. Across these domains, we consider typical challenges and opportunities including the increased availability of daily time in old age, the long past that lies behind older adults, and their limited future time perspective. Finally, we derive open research questions that may be studied to better understand how the very old may self-regulate their response to age-graded influences.