Gabriele Oettingen

The motivating function of thinking about the future: expectations versus fantasies.

Two forms of thinking about the future are distinguished: expectations versus fantasies. Positive expectations (judging a desired future as likely) predicted high effort and successful performance, but the reverse was true for positive fantasies (experiencing ones thoughts and mental images about a desired future positively). Participants were graduates looking for a job (Study 1), students with a crush on a peer of the opposite sex (Study 2), undergraduates anticipating an exam (Study 3), and patients undergoing hip-replacement surgery (Study 4). Effort and performance were measured weeks or months (up to 2 years) after expectations and fantasies had been assessed. Implications for the self-regulation of effort and performance are discussed.

Self‐regulation strategies improve self‐discipline in adolescents: benefits of mental contrasting and implementation intentions

Adolescents struggle with setting and striving for goals that require sustained self‐discipline. Research on adults indicates that goal commitment is enhanced by mental contrasting (MC), a strategy involving the cognitive elaboration of a desired future with relevant obstacles of present reality. Implementation intentions (II), which identify the action one will take when a goal‐relevant opportunity arises, represent a strategy shown to increase goal attainment when commitment is high. This study tests the effect of mental contrasting combined with implementation intentions (MCII) on successful goal implementation in adolescents. Sixty‐six 2nd‐year high school students preparing to take a high‐stakes exam in the fall of their third year were randomly assigned to complete either a 30‐minute written mental contrasting with implementation intentions intervention or a placebo control writing exercise. Students in the intervention condition completed more than 60% more practice questions than did students in the control condition. These findings point to the utility of directly teaching to adolescents mental contrasting with implementation intentions as a self‐regulatory strategy of successful goal pursuit.

Posttraumatic Resilience in Former Ugandan Child Soldiers.

The present research examines posttraumatic resilience in extremely exposed children and adolescents based on interviews with 330 former Ugandan child soldiers (age = 11-17, female = 48.5%). Despite severe trauma exposure, 27.6% showed posttraumatic resilience as indicated by the absence of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and clinically significant behavioral and emotional problems. Among these former child soldiers, posttraumatic resilience was associated with lower exposure to domestic violence, lower guilt cognitions, less motivation to seek revenge, better socioeconomic situation in the family, and more perceived spiritual support. Among the youth with significant psychopathology, many of them had symptoms extending beyond the criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder, in keeping with the emerging concept of developmental trauma disorder. Implications for future research, intervention, and policy are discussed.

Intervention Effects of Information and Self-Regulation on Eating Fruits and Vegetables Over Two Years

OBJECTIVE This study tested whether an intervention that combined information with self-regulation strategies had a better effect on eating fruits and vegetables than an information-only intervention. DESIGN Women between age 30 and 50 (N = 255) participated in a 24-month randomized controlled trial comparing two brief interventions: All participants received the same information intervention; participants in the information plus self-regulation group additionally learned a self-regulation technique that integrates mental contrasting with implementation intentions. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Participants reported in daily diaries how many servings of fruits and vegetables they ate per day during 1 week at baseline, and in the first week, 1, 2, 4, and 24 months after intervention. RESULTS Participants in both groups ate more fruits and vegetables (0.47 to 1.00 daily servings) than at baseline during the first 4 months after intervention. Two years later, participants in the information plus self-regulation group maintained the higher intake, whereas participants in the information group returned to baseline levels. CONCLUSION Adding self-regulation training to an information intervention increased its effectiveness for long-term behavior change.

Future thought and behaviour change

While there is a growing body of research on free thoughts such as fantasies and daydreams, the question of whether and how fantasies lead to effortful action and successful performance has hardly been investigated. The present article will show that, counter to what the popular self-help literature proposes, positive thinking can be detrimental to effort and success if it comes in the form of fantasies (free thoughts and images about the desired future) rather than beliefs (expectations). The article will then discuss fantasy realisation theory (FRT), which specifies how fantasies can be used to wisely self-regulate goal pursuit. The theory argues that the strategy of mental contrasting future and reality will produce both active goal pursuit and active goal disengagement, depending on a persons high versus low expectations of success, respectively. Research supporting these ideas across life domains points to non-conscious cognitive and motivational processes responsible for the effects of mental contrasting, and it depicts context variables (e.g., sad mood) that influence the rise and usage of mental contrasting. Intervention studies attest to mental contrasting as a content-free, time- and cost-effective metacognitive strategy that people can use to regulate their own goal pursuits in an autonomous way, thus helping people to become masters of their everyday life and long-term development.

The emergence and implementation of health goals

Abstract Modern theorizing on goals is applied to an analysis of the implementation and the emergence of health goals. First, a model of action phases and its concomitant concepts of implemental mindsets and implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1990, 1993) are used to explore how the initiation of health goal directed behaviors can be facilitated and how the performance of health goal directed actions is enhanced. Second, recent theorizing on the psychology of thinking about the future (Oettingen, 1996; 1997) is employed to discuss conditions and processes of the emergence of health goals. It is suggested that contrasting positive fantasies about the future with reflections on the negative aspects of reality create binding health goals that reliably affect peoples behaviors.

Physical activity in women: effects of a self-regulation intervention.

BACKGROUND A physically active lifestyle during midlife is critical to the maintenance of high physical functioning. This study tested whether an intervention that combined information with cognitive-behavioral strategies had a better effect on womens physical activity than an information-only intervention. DESIGN A 4-month longitudinal RCT comparing two brief interventions was conducted between July 2003 and September 2004. Analyses were completed in June 2008. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 256 women aged 30-50 years in a large metropolitan area in Germany. INTERVENTION The study compared a health information intervention with an information + self-regulation intervention. All participants received the same information intervention; participants in the information + self-regulation group additionally learned a technique that integrates mental contrasting with implementation intentions. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Self-reported minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week. RESULTS Participants in the information + self-regulation group were twice as physically active (i.e., nearly 1 hour more per week) as participants in the information group. This difference appeared as early as the first week after intervention and was maintained over the course of the 4 months. Participants in the information group slightly increased their baseline physical activity after intervention. CONCLUSIONS Women who learned a self-regulation technique during an information session were substantially more active than women who participated in only the information session. The self-regulation technique should be tested further as a tool for increasing the impact of interventions on behavioral change.

Mental Contrasting and Goal Commitment: The Mediating Role of Energization

Mentally contrasting a desired future with present reality is a self-regulation strategy that leads to goal commitment in line with a persons expectations of success. One possible mediator variable of these effects is level of energization. In Study 1, energization assessed by physiological measures was found to mediate the effect of mental contrasting on goal commitment. In Study 2, feelings of energization, as assessed by self-report, mediated the effect of mental contrasting on goal commitment as gauged by performance on an acute stress paradigm (giving a talk in front of a camera). Results imply that when expectations of success are high, mental contrasting provides the level of energy needed to commit to realizing desired futures.

The Projection of Implicit and Explicit Goals

In 3 studies, the authors analyzed whether projection occurs for both conscious and nonconscious goals. In Experiment 1, participants who were predisposed to hold a learning goal over a performance goal rated others as possessing more of a learning goal. In Experiment 2, participants who were either implicitly primed with or explicitly assigned to have the goal to compete perceived others as striving for competitive goals more than control participants. In Experiment 3, the authors demonstrated that it was the actual goal to compete rather than the trait construct of competitiveness that was projected. The control of automatic goal projection effects is discussed, and interpersonal consequences of goal projection are delineated.

A short goal-pursuit intervention to improve physical capacity: A randomized clinical trial in chronic back pain patients

&NA; The present study tested a short intervention using goal‐pursuit strategies to increase physical capacity in pain patients. Sixty chronic back pain patients were randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions. Both groups followed a 3‐week conventional back pain program at an outpatient back pain center. Instead of routine treatment, the intervention group received a one‐hour intervention consisting of a combination of (a) a goal‐setting strategy (i.e., mental contrasting, MC) aimed at commitment to improved physical capacity, (b) a short cognitive behavioral therapy‐oriented problem‐solving approach (CBT) to help patients overcome the obstacles associated with improving physical capacity, and (c) a goal‐pursuit strategy, i.e., implementation intentions (II) aimed at performing physical exercise regularly. At two follow‐ups (3 weeks after discharge and 3 months after returning home) the MCII‐CBT group had increased its physical capacity significantly more than the control group as measured by both behavioral measures (ergometer, lifting) and subjective ratings. Findings are discussed with relation to the use of the intervention as a specific treatment to increase chronic pain patients’ motivation to be physically active.