Brief Report
Assessing the sustainability of goal-based changes in adjustment over a four-year period

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Abstract

No published data addresses the longer-term sustainability of increases in well-being and adjustment derived from successful goal-striving. Although some theories and data suggest that such gains cannot be maintained, the sustainable happiness model [Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9, 111–131.] suggests that successful intentional activity can indeed bring about lasting gains. In the current study, the “freshman goals” sample studied by Sheldon and Houser-Marko (Study 1) [Sheldon, K. M., & Houser-Marko, L. (2001). Self-concordance, goal-attainment, and the pursuit of happiness: Can there be an upward spiral? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 152–165.] was revisited at the end of their senior year. Students who strove successfully during their freshman year, thereby enhancing their adjustment during that year, had maintained those gains three years later. Path modeling suggested that initial adjustment predicted subsequent goal-attainment which in turn predicted enhanced adjustment, combining recent theories concerning both the functional benefits of positive affect and the causes of sustainable gains in well-being.

Introduction

An important goal for positive psychology, and for health psychology more generally, is to help people increase their levels of happiness and adjustment (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). However, there is some reason to suspect that trying to increase one’s happiness level is impossible. Genetic set-point theories maintain that happiness is quite heritable, and that each individual has a characteristic level of well-being to which he or she will tend to return over time. In this view, trying to become happier may be “as futile as trying to be taller” (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996, p. 189). “Hedonic treadmill” theories provide one reason why this may be so: people tend to adapt to positive (or negative) changes in their lives, so that over time these changes lose their power to impact well-being. The well-known “lottery winner” and “paraplegia” effects illustrate this point (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978), as people from these two groups appeared to return to their original baselines over time. Finally, personality trait theories suggest that traits are quite stable over the lifetime (McCrae & Costa, 1990). Since neuroticism in particular has strong relations with well-being, this again suggests that well-being will tend to be stable over the lifespan.

However, there is also some reason for optimism. First, some researchers have had success in using interventions to increase happiness. For example, Seligman, Steen, Park, and Peterson (2005) have recently shown that habitually exercising strengths and cultivating gratitude can have significant enhancing effects on well-being. Also, research documenting the long-term effectiveness of cognitive and behavioral interventions to combat negative affect and depression has encouraging implications for the possibility of elevating long-term happiness (e.g., Gloaguen, Cottraux, Cucherat, & Blackburn, 1998). Second, older people tend to experience more life-satisfaction and less negative affect than younger people (Charles, Reynolds, & Gatz, 2001). Although these effects do not always emerge, they are seen often enough to suggest that achieving greater happiness over time is normative for the majority of people. Yet a third reason why genes are not necessarily destiny is that they appear to influence happiness indirectly—that is, by influencing the kinds of experiences and environments one has or seeks to have. Thus, unwanted effects of genes could be minimized by active efforts to avoid situations that undermine well-being or by approaching situations that enhance it (Lykken, 2000).

In short, there appears to be a paradox in the literature, with some data and perspectives suggesting that gains in happiness are maintainable, and other data and perspectives suggesting that they are not. Recently, a model of sustainable happiness was proposed (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2004, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006) that might help to resolve the paradox. The sustainable happiness model suggests that current well-being is affected by three classes of factors: genetic or dispositional factors, circumstantial or demographic factors, and activity or intentional factors. These will be considered below.

Genetic factors are unchanging and exert a constant influence, and thus serve as the “baseline” for individuals, all other factors being equal. In other words, they define the expected value or intercept in a regression predicting well-being over time. Circumstantial factors are somewhat stable positive or negative features of the person’s life, such as marital status, education, living situation, or possessions. Such factors tend to have surprisingly small (but consistent) cross-sectional effects on well-being. Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener (2005) argued that these small effects reflect the fact that people quickly adapt to circumstantial change.

In contrast, Lyubomirsky and colleagues suggested that activity factors—that is, the things people do—have the potential to bring about sustainable increases in well-being. Ongoing activity is potentially controllable and modifiable, and if people succeed in selecting personally appropriate activities, doing well at them, and also modifying how they do them (to keep the experiences they provide “fresh”), then the genetic set-point may be continually exceeded. In other words, intentional activity can potentially be enacted in such a way that the hedonic treadmill is avoided and people stay in the upper end of their set range.

Of course, “circumstances” and “activities” are extremely broad categories. However, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky (2006) showed, in three short-term longitudinal studies, that the initially positive effects of participants’ self-identified circumstantial changes faded over time, whereas the positive effects of adopting new activities and projects did not. Focusing on a particular type of activity (personal goal-striving), Sheldon and Elliot (1999) showed that achieving meaningful personal goals during a college semester boosted participants’ well-being beyond their initial baselines, and Sheldon and Houser-Marko (2001) showed that these gains could be sustained over the course of the subsequent semester. Unfortunately, however, none of these studies speak to the longer-term sustainability of activity-based gains in well-being.

Indeed, very little data exists concerning peoples’ fluctuations in happiness over longer periods of time. What data does exist suggests, again, the there is reason for pessimism. For example, Headey and Wearing (1989) found in a multi-year panel study that positive and negative events (e.g., “made lots of new friends,” “got married,” “experienced serious problems with children,” or “became unemployed”) influenced life-satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect as would be expected, but that people kept returning to their original baselines. Furthermore, Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, and Diener (2003) showed that for their sample as a whole, the life-satisfaction benefits derived from getting married tended to fade over the years (although some participants, namely those who reacted most strongly to the initial event, maintained their gain).

From the perspective of the sustainable happiness model, however, positive and negative events (and also marriage to some extent) are circumstantial factors whose impact should be expected to fade. However, to date, no published data exists concerning the longer-term effects of successful intentional activity (i.e., goal-striving) upon well-being. Do the positive effects of attaining a set of personally meaningful goals (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999) diminish over time, as suggested by the Headey and Wearing studies? Or, consistent with the sustainable happiness model, might such effects persist over a period of several years? To find the latter would provide an important new type of support for the model.

To address this question, I re-assessed Sheldon and Houser-Marko’s (2001, Study 1) “freshman goals” sample. Again, Sheldon and Houser-Marko showed that college freshmen could enhance their adjustment from the beginning to the end of their first semester at school by striving successfully for personal goals, and also showed that this new well-being could be sustained until the end of the second semester. Thus, Sheldon and Houser-Marko’s earlier findings were consistent with the premise that well-being can be increased through intentional activity, and then maintained at the new level. But did these freshman-year gains last for the entire college career?

Below, I report new data from these students, collected near the end of their senior year. I asked a single important question of these data: Were those who experienced goal-based gains in adjustment over the freshman year able to maintain their gains, as assessed at the end of the senior year? This would establish that activity-based gains in well-being are sustainable over a three year period, not just a nine month period.

Section snippets

Participants and procedure

I attempted to re-contact all of Sheldon and Houser-Marko’s (2001) freshman goal participants in early spring of their senior year. (Some had already graduated or were not reachable.) Although 239 participants began that study, only 114 completed all phases of it over their freshman year and were included in Sheldon and Houser-Marko’s final analyses. Participants were mailed a questionnaire packet, and late respondents received several follow-up letters and emails. All told, 106 of Sheldon and

Attrition analyses

Within the senior sample, I first compared the 86 senior participants with complete freshman year data to the 20 senior participants with incomplete data, focusing on the Time 1 SACQ scores. The mean difference was non-significant, suggesting that the complete sample is an unbiased representative of the initial sample’s mean level adjustment. I then compared the 86 participants with complete data (including senior data) to the 43 participants who had complete freshman data but who did not

Discussion

This study demonstrates that students who experienced goal-based gains in adjustment over their freshman year still evidenced greater adjustment, three years later. This finding directly supports the premise that within-subject gains in well-being are sustainable, not just over the short term, but also over a longer period. Furthermore, the study is consistent with the dynamic hypothesis that intentional activity offers a promising route to sustainable gains in well-being, because freshman

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