Research
Theoretical Foundation
The lab's research examines how motivation, opportunity, and constraints direct and reflect development across the adult lifespan. The roads people take through adulthood are shaped by the opportunities available to them and by the choices they make about what to pursue, when to persist, and when to change course.
The research is grounded in the Motivational Theory of Lifespan Development (Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schulz, 2010), which begins with an observation that is straightforward but often overlooked: opportunities for goal pursuit are not constant across the adult years. Opportunities are structured by age, biology, culture, social institutions, and historical time and place. How individuals experience and make sense of those opportunities as they select, pursue, and adjust goals shapes the roads they take through adulthood. Navigating these roads requires more than persistence. It requires calibrating motivational investment to the actual opportunity context, engaging deeply when engagement is adaptive and redirecting when it is not.
Five lines of research ask what this framework reveals about specific roads through adulthood: how motivational processes develop across the adult years, how they operate across the career arc, how structural beliefs about opportunity shape goal pursuit, how social relationships and developmental progress are reciprocally beneficial, and how motivational strategies interact with opportunities and constraints to shape health and well-being.
Motivation & Lifespan Development
How do motivational processes unfold across the adult years, and how does optimizing goal engagement shape developmental progress and well-being in everyday adult life?
One central application of this framework is the study of established adulthood (roughly ages 30 to 45), when most adults are simultaneously investing in work, family, health, and community. Longitudinal research finds that developmental progress across these domains, characterized by rising satisfaction and perceived control, predicts improvements in well-being over time. Progress in romantic partnerships and parenting relationships carries the strongest independent effects. The pattern suggests that adaptive development has both a motivational component, the pursuit of goals that build progress in key life domains, and an emotional one, as that progress translates into improved well-being.
A related question concerns how motivational orientations change with age. Research finds that engagement with work, health, and family shifts as the opportunity landscape of adulthood evolves. Importantly, engagement in one domain typically has positive effects in others, illustrating how people navigate goal diversity and the cross-domain consequences of their pursuits. For prosocial behavior in particular, the motivational underpinnings shift in ways that map onto the broader developmental landscape, reflecting changes in opportunity, perceived control, and the relative costs of engagement. These empirical findings are grounded in a series of theoretical contributions that develop and apply the Motivational Theory of Lifespan Development across contexts of adult life.
Key Themes
- Adulthood as a distinctive, multidimensional, and multistage developmental period
- Developmental progress and well-being
- Motivation across key life domains in adulthood
- Goal diversity and cross-domain consequences
- The Motivational Theory of Lifespan Development
Work, Career & Retirement
How do people's working lives, from entry through midlife to retirement, both respond to and reshape the motivational landscapes they navigate?
Career entry is one of the most consequential goal pursuit contexts of early adulthood. Young adults who sustain goal engagement despite uncertainty, using motivational strategies to maintain commitment through setback and structural obstacles, achieve better early career outcomes. Whether the opportunity structure is perceived as open or closed matters too: opportunity beliefs shape not only whether young adults pursue career goals but how they regulate motivation when outcomes are uncertain. Shared agency adds another dimension. Career pursuits unfold in ongoing coordination with parents, partners, and close others whose support and expectations shape both strategy and outcome.
Midlife brings a different set of challenges. How old workers feel (their subjective age) predicts motivational engagement with work goals, with consequences for both performance and well-being. As retirement approaches, patterns of goal engagement and disengagement across life domains predict well-being and cognitive functioning well into retirement. The retirement transition, in this sense, is less an endpoint than a motivational reorganization, one that requires the same calibration of goals to opportunities that defines adaptive development at every stage of adulthood.
Key Themes
- Career entry and goal pursuit under uncertainty
- Opportunity beliefs and motivational self-regulation
- Subjective age and work motivation in midlife
- The retirement transition and goal reorganization
- Shared agency in occupational goal pursuit
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.
Key Themes
- Beliefs about merit, opportunity, and structural fairness
- SES causal beliefs and their behavioral consequences
- Economic context and opportunity beliefs
- Civic engagement and political socialization in adulthood
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.
Key Themes
- Social relationships, health, and well-being
- Caregiver communication and development
- Neighborhood context and well-being
- Social relationships during life transitions
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.
Key Themes
- Motivational engagement with health threats
- Food insecurity and its consequences for student well-being and academics
- Psychedelic experience and well-being
- Structural conditions as determinants of health and well-being