How thoughts of death and intrinsic/extrinsic goal orientation affect well‐being during the pandemic

Abstract

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, reminders of death are so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to avoid death‐related thoughts. This research examined the effect of COVID‐19‐induced thoughts of death on life evaluation, a core component of well‐being, and investigated the moderating role of goal orientation in this effect. Results from two experiments (N = 384) indicated that participants with a relative orientation toward extrinsic aspirations (wealth, fame, image) decreased their life evaluation, both when under conscious death thoughts (Study 1) and after being distracted from these thoughts (Study 2). By contrast, participants with a relative orientation toward intrinsic aspirations (personal growth, meaningful relationships, community contributions) increased their life evaluation when under conscious death thoughts, while they maintained their baseline life evaluation after being distracted from these thoughts. This research also found evidence for the moderating role of belongingness. However, no evidence was found for the moderating roles of self‐esteem and attachment style.

How Do Late Adults Experience Meaning During the COVID-19 Lockdown? The Role of Intrinsic Goals

“…Because the COVID-19 crisis posed several challenges, pursuing and attaining intrinsic life goals may have acted as an important source of resilience (Weinstein & Ryan, 2011 ; Ling et al, 2016 ). To illustrate, experimental research during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that intrinsic goal importance related to more life satisfaction, even after being induced with thoughts about one’s own death (Sonmez, 2022 ). Exploring intrinsic goal importance and attainment as resilience factors is highly relevant for late adults in particular, since evidence was obtained that throughout life, older adults tend to increasingly focus on intrinsic, rather than extrinsic goals (Kasser & Ryan, 1996 ; Morgan & Robinson, 2013 ).…”

Pandemics and consumers' mental well‐being

“…In contrast, research that focused more on generalized or positive influences of the pandemic examined such topics as specific types of consumption behaviors and corresponding changes during the pandemic, including online physical activity behaviors (Cronshaw, 2022 ), food and beverage consumption (Jaud & Lunardo, 2022 ), and effects on sustainable consumption (Hüttel & Balderjahn, 2022 ). Other papers focused more on consumers' psychological responses to the pandemic including risk perceptions and consumer purchase behavior (Li & Qian, 2022 ) and goal orientation effects on well‐being (Sonmez, 2022 ). Articles in this special issue also examined morality based consumer responses including religion versus escape behaviors on life satisfaction (Ekici & Watson, 2022 ), religiosity's influence on service failure response and emotional well‐being (Sarofim et al, 2022 ), and mortality salience and altruism (Jin & Ryu, 2022 ).…”