Open AccessEvaluation of the Happiness Through Goal-Setting Training
Author(s) -
Christian Ehrlich
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
psychological reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.645
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1558-691X
pISSN - 0033-2941
DOI - 10.1177/00332941211071007
Subject(s) - happiness , psychology , pleasure , goal pursuit , positive psychology , psychological intervention , goal setting , applied psychology , affect (linguistics) , social psychology , life satisfaction , subjective well being , training (meteorology) , intervention (counseling) , psychotherapist , physics , communication , psychiatry , meteorology
This paper describes the evaluation of the Happiness through Goal-Setting Training, a multiple intervention approach which helps participants to reflect on, and modify their reasons for goal pursuit. The training is theoretically grounded in the goal-striving reasons framework. This framework captures four important reasons for goal pursuit and has received a substantial amount of empirical support for its predictive power in relation to positive psychological functioning. The four goal-striving reasons are the pursuit of goals out of pleasure, altruism, fear of self-esteem loss or necessity. The evaluation of the training, employing a before-and-after study design, is based on two data sets comprising data from a face-to-face delivery of the training ( N = 41) and an online delivery of the training ( N = 40). Overall, the findings from both studies, using paired sample t-tests, show that the Happiness through Goal-Setting Training significantly improves the quality of people’s reasons for goal pursuit as well as their positive psychological functioning measured through life satisfaction, positive affect, negative affect and work-engagement. Thus, the Happiness through Goal-Setting Training complements the existing suite of well-being interventions by providing a happiness training that focusses specifically on improving people’s reasons for goal-pursuit.