Purpose in life as a system that creates and sustains health and well-being: An integrative, testable theory - McKnight & Kashdan (2009) - Article

What do volunteer services, social support, pet care, and religious attendance have in common?

Recent studies indicate that people participating in these activities live longer than those who do not. Purpose may link these behaviors. In this article, they hypothesize that purpose leads to longer life span, fewer health care problems, and greater life satisfaction. It is an important predictive variable of physical health and mental health. 

What Is Purpose?

Purpose directs life goals and daily decisions by guiding the use of finite personal resources. Purpose offers direction. Living in accord with one’s purpose offers that person a self-sustaining source of meaning through goal pursuit and goal attainment. It is woven in a person's identity and behavior. It helps organize several areas of research of many disciplins. 

What is the difference between purpose and relgion and meaning? 

All three concepts are about personal agency, a view of behavioral action and attribution. The difference is that purpose is not essential to well-being. A person can be healty for genetic reasons, without purpose having anything to do with that. Besides, religious faith is not necessary purpose. Purpose can serve as an outcome of faith, so you will act in accord with the religious teachings, but purpose can also come from nonfaith bases, such as goodwill. Also, purpose gives a sense of meaning that may not always be recognizable nor easily articulated. Finally, purpose is not a mere product of faith, meaning, or personal agency. Meaning probably drives the development of purpose, but once a purpose is developed, it drives the meaning. 

What is the difference between purpose and goals? 

Goals ar more precise in their influence of priximal behaviors. Purpose provides a broader motivational component that stimulates goals and influences behavior. It motivates people to be goal orented. Another difference is that goasl have terminal outcomes, purposes don't have to have these. Purpose mostly seems to be the supraordinate goal manager. Goals, therefore, are central to and are produced by purpose.

What are the three dimensions of purpose? 

Purpose lies along a three-dimensional continuum, consisting of: 

• Scope, which refers to how central the purpose is in a person’s life, how much it influences the actions, thoughts and emotions. A purpose with a broad scope will be less organized but also influence a greater range of behaviors across a wider context.
• Strength may be described best as the tendency for the purpose to influence. A strong purpose influences the relevant behaviors a lot. The more central a purpose is in a person’s life and the more that purpose influences the actions, thoughts, and emotions of that person, the more likely that person will benefit from having that purpose. 
• Awareness is the extent to which a person is aware and can articulate her purpose.

Scope and strength relate to awareness by influencing the cognitive load. Awareness decreases cognitive load by integrating motivation and behavior into a person’s cognitive architectural framework. When a person is not aware of a purpose but still influenced by that purpose, there exists greater cognitive load and less efficient resource allocation.

What if you pursue multiple purposes? 

To a point, having multiple purposes can be benificial. Shifting between purposes facilitates the ongoing pursuit of purposeful living. Too many purposes lead to constant switching, which can not lead to any progress.  

A purpose that is consistent with wellestablished social values tends to produce intermediate goals that become easier to accomplish over time. Even though there may be intermittent conflict with external forces, goal-related progress and achievement is generally facilitated and rewarded by society. Social acceptance of purposes likely affects the person who lives for the purpose by imposing or reducing barriers. When barriers are increased, we expect people to experience far greater stress when pursuing a purpose. Those without a purpose might find other activities or pursuits to satisfy them if the resistance gets too great.

What is the social psychological view on purpose? 

The self-determination theory suggests that satisfying feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are essential to facilitate personal development and psychological well-being. It helps explain why personal strivings may have differential influences on well-being. The benefits of striving are compromised when a person feels controlled by external or internal pressures (e.g., caregiver wishes, guilt), ill-equipped to be successful, or unsupported by others. Many SDT researchers refer to self-concordant strivings as the optimal framework for pursuing desired life aims. Self-concordant strivings are defined as the “extent to which people pursue their set of personal goals with intrinsic interest and identity congruence rather than with feelings of introjected guilt and external compulsion”

Terror management theory provides a different motivational framework that focuses on the inevitability of death. Attempts to cope with this existential dread leads to an indulgence in dominant cultural ideas, symbols, and behaviors to ward off anxiety. People develop and pursue goals, meaning, and growth opportunities to avoid death-related anxiety.

Purpose does not seem to be reducible to either SDT or TMT. The development and pursuit of purpose can certainly be influenced by the ingredients inherent to SDT or TMT but until evidence suggests otherwise, we are proponents of equifinality— purpose can be the end state of numerous motivations and developmental pathways. As discussed previously, we also do not believe purpose is reducible to other singular motives such as needs. The inclusion of purposeful living as an explanatory variable in facilitating particular actions is best viewed as a complement in the hierarchical structure of self-regulation and personality (for a similar viewpoint, see Little, Salemla-Aro, & Phillips, 2007). Lastly, we emphasize that purpose offers an incremental contribution to both SDT and TMT. Both SDT and TMT probably offer better short-term, proximal predictions, as compared with our theory of purpose. 

What is the evolution scientific view on purpose? 

Resource allocation involves the distribution of scarce resources (e.g., energy) to important processes. Organisms thrive when they adapt to changing environmental conditions and perish when they fail to adapt. Purpose may provide the causal force for efficient resource allocation.

What is the behavioral economics view on purpose? 

Efficient resource allocation from an economist’s standpoint is parallel to the theory of comparative advantage with nations, which stipulates that optimal resource allocation comes from a country producing goods that are most efficiently produced by that country and importing goods that are most efficiently produced elsewhere. Purpose may be a manager’s most powerful tool to get workers to operate at peak efficiency. 

What is the psychoneuroimmunology view on purpose? 

Purpose ought to serve as a buffer in stressful times. The psychoneuroimmunology literature suggests that chronic stress reduces immune response. Unpredictable and uncontrollable events ought to be maximally stressful for those behaving without the luxury of a central, motivating life aim. Purpose leads to a surplus of resources to protect against threats to immune response. 

What is the role of purpose in emotion? 

A person pursuing a purpose may often find obstacles to purpose-consistent behaviors. Emotional instability interferes with goal pursuit.

Can purpose buffer the impact of extreme stress in terms of resilience or speedier recovery?

A person’s framework for understanding the world, other people, and the self are disrupted after traumatic experiences. People try to reconstruct their knowledge structures. Resilience tends to be the most common trajectory in the aftermath of traumatic events. That is minor stress reactions followed by a quick return to normal functioning. Purpose is one, but not the only, potential explanation for how people can become resilient.  Flexible use of various coping strategies to meet particular situational demands predicts resilience. Purpose mandates flexibility and offers an overarching framework by which to predict and understand stress responses. 

What are the consequences of purposeful living?

Physical and mental health seems to be an outcome influenced by purpose, but there is no direct empirical evidence for this. Physical health benefits come from more active, healthier lifestyles. Mental health benefits come from a “buffer” against life circumstances that often lead to mental health problems. When a person is dedicated to a purpose, he ought to be more prone to show behavior that is consistent. If you have a purpose, this makes the chance at a disorder smaller, because a disorder would derive from the wanted outcome. Purposeful activities often require exercising character strengths such as courage and justice that result in challenges against other people or established norms. These stressful activities serve as substantial contributors to an engaging and meaningful life.When people engage in self-determined, satisfying experiences, they increase their endurance during challenging activities. 

What are essential elements of purpose? 

• Purpose stimulates beharioral consistency, it is a motivation to overcome obstacles and to seek alternative means. 
• Purpose generates appetitively motivated behaviors. The bigger the appetitive motivation, the stronger the purpose
• Purpose stimulates psycholigical flexibility. People find ways to avoid problems by being flexible to manage their environment. 
• Purpose fosters efficient resource allocation and it leads to more productive cognitive, behavioral and physiological activity. 
• Purpose involves a higher level cognitive process, driven by the cerebral cortex. It is different from primal motivations.