Waiting with purpose: A reliable but small association between purpose in life and impulsivity

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.11.010

Personality and Individual Differences

Volume 90, February 2016, Pages 187-189

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.11.010 Get rights and content

Highlights

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Purpose in life is beneficial for health and well-being and promotes longevity.
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Impulsivity is related to a broad range of risk behaviors and maladaptive outcomes.
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Results show purpose inversely linked to impulsivity, using delay-discounting task.
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Much of the variance in the purpose–impulsivity relationship remains unexplained.

Abstract

Purpose in life contributes to health and wellbeing. We examine the link between purpose and behavioral impulsivity that may account for these benefits. In a community sample of 503 adults, we found a small yet reliable positive association between purpose and valuing future rewards on a delayed discounting task, a behavioral index of impulsivity. This bootstrapped correlation remained after accounting for Big-5 personality traits, positive affect, and demographic characteristics, suggesting a unique and robust link between purpose and impulsivity (r = .1). We interpret this connection as evidence that purpose enables a broader life view, which serves to inhibit impulsive distractions.

Introduction

Purpose serves as an overarching framework that optimizes health and outcomes for those who have it. To have purpose in life is to be guided by “a self-organizing life aim that organizes and stimulates goals, manages behaviors, and provides a sense of meaning” (McKnight & Kashdan, 2009; p. 242). Purposeful individuals possess a dispositional and prospective sense that systematically guides their actions toward future achievements (Damon, Menon, & Bronk, 2003). By temporally orienting one's self toward a long view, purposeful individuals may limit the perceived value of proximal opportunities in order to take advantage those of greater rewards to come.

Impulsivity, on the other hand, generally refers to the lack of forethought or consideration of consequences associated with one's actions. While impulsive behaviors are not inherently wrong or malicious, they are often characterized as destabilizing and risky because they are undertaken with inadequate regard for one's circumstances (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1977) and can lead to undesirable outcomes. One common assessment of impulsivity involves asking individuals to choose between two rewards: an immediate and less valuable choice ($100 today) or a future and more valuable choice ($125 in one month). Individuals tend to prefer the immediate and less valuable reward — a phenomenon referred to as delay discounting (Estle, S.J., et al., 2006, Myerson, J., et al., 2001). Conceptually, impulsive individuals would lack the long view one observes in purposeful individuals. In the current study, we investigated the link between dispositional sense of purpose in life and behavioral impulsivity. Individuals that do not discount the value of delayed rewards are predicted to have a greater sense of purpose in life. Importantly, we accounted for well-known correlates of purpose (e.g., personality traits, and positive affect; Burrow, A.L. and Hill, P.L., 2011, Scheier, M., et al., 2006) as well as demographic characteristics (age, gender, education) in our analyses so to better identify the unique and independent link between purpose and impulsivity.

Section snippets

Participants

Data were collected as part of the Human Connectome Project, an open access big data initiative dedicated to understanding brain function and behavior (Van Essen et al., 2013). The current sample was from the November 2014 data release (500 Subjects + MEG2; http://www.humanconnectome.org). Behavioral and demographic data were analyzed from 503 healthy adults (59% women; see Table 1 for demographic information). Eleven participants lacked data for years of education. Participants completed a

Results

Intercorrelations among purpose, delay discounting and the covariates (age, gender, education, positive affect, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and extroversion), as well as the present sample's maximum, minimum, mean, and SD of these scores can be found in Table 1. Our central question was how purpose and delay discounting relate. We found a significant correlation between purpose and delay discounting of small rewards (r(501) = .10, p < .05, 95% CI: .01–.18) and a trend

Discussion

Despite growing evidence that a sense of purpose in life plays an important role in wellbeing, its implications for behavior have received little attention. The present study provides evidence that a greater sense of purpose in life is associated with lower impulsivity, demonstrated via a monetary delay discounting task. Consistent with our hypothesis, individuals who reported having a greater sense of purpose preferred larger future gains to smaller immediate ones. Importantly, these results

Acknowledgments

Data were provided by the Human Connectome Project, WU-Minn Consortium (Principal Investigators: David Van Essen and Kamil Ugurbil; 1U54MH091657) funded by the 16 NIH Institutes and Centers that support the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; and by the McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience at Washington University. R.N.S. is supported in part by the Institute for Social Sciences at Cornell University.

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There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (24)

The role of purpose in the stress process: A homeostatic account
2024, Journal of Research in Personality
The accumulation of evidence that having a sense of purpose contributes to greater health and well-being has vastly outpaced investigations into why this is so. Here, we offer a novel functional account for the demonstrated benefits of purpose by characterizing it as a resource that maintains psychological homeostasis. We posit that a sense of purpose recenters conscious attention toward prospective and overarching aims, thereby limiting the magnitude of disruption to well-being caused by the proximal stimuli. By attenuating reactivity to proximal events both stressful and uplifting, a sense of purpose facilitates greater stability in health and functioning over time. We leverage this mechanistic account with specific examples found across areas of psychological science and outline questions to guide future research.
Trust in purpose, or trust and purpose?: Institutional trust influences the association between sense of purpose and COVID-19 vaccination
2023, Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Having a sense of purpose is associated with a wide variety of positive health outcomes, largely because purposeful individuals appear to take better care of themselves physically. However, work is limited regarding the role of purpose during health crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
The current cross-sectional study investigated whether having a sense of purpose was associated COVID-19 vaccination rates and willingness, among a Swiss adult sample (n = 2328, Mean = 52.33 years), after accounting for participants' trust in different institutions.
Results found that adults with higher levels of institutional trust were more likely to be vaccinated (rs range from 0.06 to 0.13) or were willing to do so (rs range from 0.22 to 0.39). Sense of purpose was associated modestly with greater vaccination status (r = 0.06). However, sense of purpose moderated several associations between trust and vaccination outcomes. Namely, sense of purpose was associated with greater likelihood for vaccination when individuals reported greater trust in university research centers and political institutions.
Findings are discussed with respect to how they shape our understanding of purpose-health associations.
Sense of purpose in life and inflammation in healthy older adults: A longitudinal study
2022, Psychoneuroendocrinology
Citation Excerpt :
For example, links have been found between purpose and greater likelihood of engaging in more adaptive coping strategies such as proactive coping (e.g., working to neutralize or mitigate effects of anticipated future stressors) (Miao and Gan, 2020); these coping strategies are associated with healthier levels of health-promoting behaviors such as physical activity (Litzelman, Kent, and Rowland, 2018). People who experience higher purpose also display other psychological characteristics that might enhance their capacity to react to stressors more effectively, such as higher self-efficacy (Zilioli, Slatcher, Ong, and Gruenewald, 2015) as well as an enhanced ability to curb impulsivity and exert self-control (Burrow and Spreng, 2016). Our study has several limitations including potential confounding by unmeasured variables.
A higher sense of purpose in life has been linked with reduced risk of age-related chronic health conditions that share elevated inflammation as a key risk factor (e.g., neurodegenerative diseases, heart disease, and diabetes). While prior research has documented cross-sectional associations between higher sense of purpose and lower inflammation, few studies have examined the association between purpose and changes in inflammation over time.
We tested if a higher sense of purpose was prospectively associated with lower likelihood of developing unhealthy C-reactive protein levels in older adults who initially had healthy CRP levels (i.e., <3 ug/mL).
Participants were 6925 adults aged > 50 in the Health and Retirement Study who were followed for 8 years. Participants completed the purpose in life subscale of the Ryff Psychological Well-being Scales at study baseline in 2006/2008. CRP was obtained from blood spots collected at baseline and after 4 and 8 years of follow-up. Pooled logistic regression estimated discrete-time hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the association between baseline purpose and onset of unhealthy CRP levels (>3 ug/mL).
There was no strong evidence of an association between baseline continuous purpose scores and onset of unhealthy CRP levels over time in the overall analytic sample. In sex-stratified models, higher purpose was associated with lower hazards of developing unhealthy CRP levels among men, while associations were null in women (e.g., in sociodemographics-adjusted model, men: HR=0.89, 95% CI: 0.79–0.99; women: HR=0.96, 95% CI: 0.85–1.08; interaction between continuous purpose scores and sex p = 0.15).
Findings suggest that a higher versus lower sense of purpose is associated with lower inflammation levels in older men. In specific populations, purpose may serve as a novel target for future interventions aimed at reducing inflammation
Sense of purpose in life and five health behaviors in older adults
2020, Preventive Medicine
Citation Excerpt :
Thus, high purpose might disrupt the stress-unhealthy behavior pathway. People with a higher sense of purpose also display a heightened ability to curb impulsivity (Burrow and Spreng, 2016) and report higher self-efficacy (Rush et al., 2020). Thus, people with higher purpose might avoid impulsively indulging in unhealthy behaviors (e.g., comfort eating) and instead deploy their higher self-efficacy to engage in healthier behaviors even if they are not immediately appealing (e.g., eating spinach, going to the gym).
Accumulating evidence shows that a higher sense of purpose in life is associated with lower risk of chronic conditions and premature mortality. Health behaviors might partially explain these findings, however, the prospective association between sense of purpose and health behaviors is understudied. We tested whether a higher sense of purpose at baseline was associated with lower likelihood of developing unhealthy behaviors over time. Prospective data were from the Health and Retirement Study, a national sample of U.S. older adults. Our sample included 13,770 adults assessed up to five times across eight years. Among people who met recommended guidelines for a given health behavior outcome at baseline, those in the top versus lowest quartile of purpose in life had 24% lower likelihood of becoming physically inactive (95% CI: 0.68–0.85), 33% lower likelihood of developing sleep problems (95% CI: 0.58–0.79), and 22% lower likelihood of developing unhealthy body mass index (BMI) (95% CI: 0.69–0.87) in sociodemographic-adjusted models. Further there was a marginal reduction in smoking relapse (HR = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.41–1.03) and no association with heavy alcohol use (HR = 1.02, 95% CI: 0.81–1.29). Findings for physical inactivity, sleep problems, and unhealthy BMI remained evident after further adjusting for baseline health status and depression. Our results, suggest that a sense of purpose in life might emerge (with further research) as a valuable target to consider for interventions aimed at helping older adults maintain some health behaviors.
Neural congruence between intertemporal and interpersonal self-control: Evidence from delay and social discounting
2017, NeuroImage
Citation Excerpt :
Delay discounting (DD) is the tendency to subjectively devalue future rewards in favor of immediate gratification and is a commonly used measure of behavioral self-control (Green and Myerson, 2004). There is substantial variability in discount rates (Odum, 2011; Peters & Buchel, 2011) and individual differences are predictive of a broad range of behaviors, including general intelligence (Shamosh et al., 2008), purpose in life (Burrow & Spreng, 2016) and physical health (Moffitt et al., 2011). Moreover, excessive rates of DD are characteristic of several maladaptive and pathological behaviors (Bickel et al., 2012a, b).
Behavioral studies using delay and social discounting as indices of self-control and altruism, respectively, have revealed functional similarities between farsighted and social decisions. However, neural evidence for this functional link is lacking. Twenty-five young adults completed a delay and social discounting task during fMRI scanning. A spatiotemporal partial least squares analysis revealed that both forms of discounting were well characterized by a pattern of brain activity in areas comprising frontoparietal control, default, and mesolimbic reward networks. Both forms of discounting appear to draw on common neurocognitive mechanisms, regardless of whether choices involve intertemporal or interpersonal outcomes. We also observed neural profiles differentiating between high and low discounters. High discounters were well characterized by increased medial temporal lobe and limbic activity. In contrast, low discount rates were associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and right temporoparietal junction. This pattern may reflect biological mechanisms underlying behavioral heterogeneity in discount rates.
How many likes did I get?: Purpose moderates links between positive social media feedback and self-esteem.
2017, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Citation Excerpt :
If receiving or observing likes activates these neural regions, then lessening responsiveness to them likely requires inhibiting reactions to them as social endorsements. Interestingly, Burrow and Spreng (2016) found that purpose in life inhibits impulsivity to reward seeking. Thus, greater inhibition may be a mechanism by which purpose contours the impact of social appraisals on self-esteem.
Sociometer theory asserts that self-esteem is calibrated to one's perceived relational value. Accordingly, positive feedback should boost self-esteem because it signals acceptance by others. Yet, the extent to which self-esteem is sensitive to positive feedback may depend on individuals' sense of purpose. In two studies (N = 342), we tested purpose in life as a source of self-directed and prosocial motivation and predicted that having greater purpose would lessen sensitivity to social media feedback. Study 1 revealed that the number of likes individuals received on their Facebook profile pictures was positively associated with self-esteem. Study 2 replicated these findings experimentally by manipulating the number of likes individuals received on self-photographs posted to a mock Facebook site. In both studies, links between likes and self-esteem were diminished for those with greater purpose. Implications for purpose as a moderator of the self-esteem contingencies of positive social feedback are discussed.

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Short CommunicationWaiting with purpose: A reliable but small association between purpose in life and impulsivity

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Participants

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Neuron

NeuroImage

Impulsivity and cigarette smoking: Delay discounting in current, never, and ex-smokers

Psychopharmacology

Purpose as a form of identity capital for positive youth adjustment

Developmental Psychology

The development of purpose during adolescence

Applied Developmental Sciences

Differential effects of amount ontemporal and probability discounting of gains and losses

Memory and Cognition

Short Communication
Waiting with purpose: A reliable but small association between purpose in life and impulsivity