Research

Motivation & Lifespan Development

Motivational processes change systematically across adulthood and play a central role in shaping developmental progress and well-being.

One focus of our research is how individuals invest simultaneously in work, family, health, and community across adulthood, especially during periods when these demands are most strongly concentrated. Longitudinal research shows that developmental progress across these domains, reflected in rising satisfaction and perceived control, predicts improvements in well-being over time, with familial relationships carrying the strongest independent effects.

We also examine how motivational engagement shifts as the opportunity structure of adulthood evolves. Engagement across work, health, and family changes with age but remains interconnected. Prosocial motivational patterns shift alongside broader changes in opportunity, perceived control, and the costs of engagement. Our research provides empirical support for the importance of matching goals to opportunities, pursuing a diversity of goals across key life domains, and managing the cross-domain and long-term consequences of these pursuits.

Work, Career & Retirement

Work trajectories across adulthood reflect how individuals regulate motivation in response to changing opportunities and constraints.

Career entry is a critical period of developmental goal pursuit under uncertainty. Young adults who sustain engagement despite setbacks and structural obstacles achieve better early career outcomes. Opportunity beliefs also matter: perceiving the opportunity structure as open or constrained shapes both goal pursuit and motivational self-regulation. Career development happens in coordination with others, as parents, partners, and close others contribute to shared agency that shapes both work goal selection and pursuit.

Midlife brings a different set of challenges. Our work also includes theoretical contributions that distinguish between career trajectories defined by the timing of the career peak. Early-peak careers offer rapid advancement but limited sustained opportunities for growth and competence fulfillment, whereas late-peak careers require extended preparation but more prolonged opportunities for continued development.

As retirement approaches, our research finds that motivational engagement with work is shaped in part by subjective age, as how old individuals feel predicts work engagement with consequences for both performance and well-being. Patterns of goal engagement and disengagement across life domains predict well-being and cognitive functioning into retirement. We find that the transition to retirement is best understood as a period of motivational reorganization that requires aligning goals with changing opportunities and constraints.

Social Mobility & Inequality

What do people believe about who succeeds and why, and how do those beliefs shape the goals they pursue and the roads they take?

Whether individuals perceive the opportunity structure as open or closed, whether success is earned through effort, determined by structural advantage, or a matter of chance, reflects and directs their motivational self-regulation in fundamental ways. This line of work has developed measures for perceived social mobility and established a validated measure of SES causal beliefs, documenting how those beliefs develop through experiences with educational systems, family context, and economic conditions. Young adults who perceive opportunity as real and effort as consequential pursue goals differently and recover from setback differently than those who see the structure as closed. Motivational processes, in other words, are calibrated to opportunity beliefs, and those calibrations shape the roads people take into midlife and beyond.

The consequences of these beliefs extend well beyond career pursuit. SES causal beliefs predict civic engagement, consumer attitudes, and endorsement of redistributive norms. The pattern is consistent: how people understand the opportunity structure shapes how they relate to it. This work also documents how structural conditions shape the beliefs themselves. Data collected following the Great Recession found that economic contraction directly altered how young adults understood the relationship between effort and reward, with parallel findings during COVID-19. The political dimension is also part of the research program, examining how civic and political attitudes continue to develop in adulthood, shaped in part by individuals' prior experience of opportunity and fairness.

Social Relationships

How do close relationships shape the roads individuals take through adulthood, and how do those roads, in turn, reshape relationships?

Close relationships are active participants in adult development, not simply its backdrop. One area of this work examines how the structure and quality of social relationships shape health and well-being across adulthood. Research on women in later adulthood finds that friendships, family bonds, and romantic partnerships each contribute to well-being through distinct mechanisms. A parallel line of research seeks to better understand the social relationship landscape of adult men, whose relational lives have received less systematic attention despite clear implications for physical and psychological health.

The relational roads individuals take in adulthood are also shaped by earlier experiences. The quality and content of caregiver-child communication about romantic relationships predicts attachment security and relationship quality in emerging adulthood, consistent with the view that relational patterns are learned and developed, not simply discovered. Neighborhood context extends the picture further: parents' perceptions of social cohesion predict children's psychological well-being in ways that go beyond individual family dynamics. Lines of research also examine social relationships at critical junctures, including exploring connections between relational support, coping, and well-being as youth transition out of foster care and into adulthood.

Health & Well-being

How do motivational strategies, structural conditions, and individual choices combine to shape health and well-being across the adult years?

Health challenges are among the most demanding contexts for motivational regulation. When adults face a health threat, they must decide how much effort to invest in managing it, when to adjust their strategies, and when sustained engagement costs more than it returns. Emerging research in this area examines how individuals motivationally respond to health threats over time, finding that neither persistent engagement nor disengagement is universally adaptive. What matters is whether the strategy fits the actual opportunity context for health improvement.

Well-being is also shaped by choices and actions, as well as the biological and societal conditions that shape development. Research on food insecurity among college students documents the downstream well-being consequences of material hardship, examining effects on coping, academic goal pursuit, psychological resilience, and mental health across multiple institutions and data collection contexts. An emerging, student-driven line of inquiry examines how psychedelic experience relates to well-being, finding associations between psychedelic use and self-actualization. These findings reflect a broader argument running through the lab's work: health and well-being outcomes are the product of both individual motivational regulation and the structural conditions that enable or foreclose it. This work extends the Motivational Theory of Lifespan Development directly into the health domain, where its implications for aging and well-being are particularly consequential.