Brief Summary of Research Interests

Ken Sheldon

Fall 2004

My primary research focus is on participants' personal goals, and the effects of different types of personal goals upon growth, development, and well-being. Several years of research are summarized by the "Self-concordance model" (Sheldon & Elliot, JPSP, 1999; Sheldon & Houser-Marko, JPSP, 2001), which integrates goal-striving, need-satisfaction, and well-being change constructs into a single time-sequential model. This model, which is based on Deci and Ryan's self-determination theory but which considerably extends the theory, predicts the long-term effects of choosing personal goals that one enjoys and identifies with.

In the last four years I have been examining a variety of important related issues. My first NIMH RO-1 grant (4 years; awarded in 2002; I am PI) attempts to develop implicit or indirect measures of self-concordance. The problem is that a person may be self-deceived or in the grip of impression management concerns when he claims that he enjoys and identifies with a goal. Studies funded by this grant to date have used priming, reaction time, IAT, and TAT methodologies (Sheldon et al., under review) to assess implicit self-concordance. Future studies in this grant will use Julius Kuhl's self-infiltration methodology and Jim Blascovich's threat/challenge cardiovascular methodology to uncover latent ambivalence concerning goals.

My new NIMH RO-1 grant (5 years; awarded in 2004, with Sonja Lyubomirsky as co-PI) is examining the possibility of sustainably increasing one's well-being. Is this achievable, or are people instead doomed to keep returning to their "genetic set-point," no matter what ("what goes up must come down")? The grant involves testing and refining our theoretical model of how well-being may be permanently increased (Lyubormirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, Review of General Psychology, in press), as well as testing a variety of interventions for accomplishing this, which are based on emerging positive psychology research.

Another current research interest involves testing the claims made in my recent book, Optimal human being: An integrated multi-level perspective (Erlbaum, 2004). This book first provides a novel epistemology and suggestions for achieving consilience between the different human sciences, and for resolving conundrums such as free will versus determinism, top-down versus bottom-up causation, and holism versus reductionism. It then summarizes the scholarly literature concerning human thriving by analyzing personality at six levels: organismic foundations, personality traits, goal/motives, self/self-images, social relations/interactions, and cultural membership. Research in process is testing whether constructs at each level of analysis have unique relations with well-being, as predicted, and also, whether personality content, as well as structure, must be considered in understanding optimality.

I also have a variety of other ongoing research interests worth mentioning. I have been studying social dilemmas, and factors which contribute to their resolution; in particular, I have been use multi-level modeling to give new support to the controversial evolutionary theory of "group selection" (Sheldon, JPSP, 1999; Sheldon and McGregor, JP, 2000; Sheldon et al., Human Nature, 2000). In addition, I have been studying psychological needs, and the questions of which ones (if any) are most basic and fundamental (Sheldon et al., PSPB, 1996, 2000; JPSP, 2001). In addition, I have been conducting cross-cultural research, to test self-determination theory's claims of universal applicability (Sheldon et al., Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2004; Elliot, Sheldon et al., Psychological Science, 2001). In addition, I have been conducting life-span research, to test the organismic theoretical claim that people continue to mature in important ways over the lifespan (Sheldon & Kasser, Developmental Psychology, 2001; Sheldon, JRP, in press; Sheldon et al., European Journal of Personality, in press).

Finally, I have also studied creativity, and the personality factors that predict it (Sheldon, Creativity Research Journal, 1995, 1996; Encyclopedia of Creativity, 1999); approach versus avoidance motivation, and its effects on health and well-being (Elliot & Sheldon, JPSP, 1996, 1998); the interface of intergroup and interpersonal theories of psychological needs (Bettencourt and Sheldon, JPSP, 2001; Sheldon & Bettencourt, British Journal of Social Psychology); the structure of human values in relation to materialism and consumption (Sheldon et al., PSPB, 2004; Sheldon & Kasser, PSPB, 1998; Kasser & Sheldon, Psych Science, 2000); and the relationship between self-determination theory and terror management theory (i.e., defensive versus growth motives; Kasser & Sheldon, Psych Science, 2000; Routledge, Arndt, & Sheldon, European Journal of Social Psychology, 2004). In addition, I am active in the positive psychology movement. I was the winner of a Templeton prize in 2002, was editor of a special section on positive psychology in American Psychologist in 2001, and chair the committee that awards the Seligman prize to the best dissertation in positive psychology each year.