An underexplored pathway to life satisfaction: The development and validation of the synchronicity awareness and meaning-detecting scale

Abstract

IntroductionSynchronicity refers to the psychological process of meaningful coincidences. The present study aimed to build and expand upon a model of synchronicity awareness and meaning-detecting (REM)—receptiveness (R) as a precondition for an exceptional encounter (E) triggering emotions and meaning-detecting (M)—by assessing the prevalence of the phenomenon and its associations with well-being.Methods and ResultsResults from two studies reported here employing adult community samples (N = 198 and N = 440) demonstrate coherent, replicable structure and good internal reliability for a 35-item, two-factor Synchronicity Awareness and Meaning-Detecting (SAMD) Scale. Synchronicity awareness (SA) and meaning-detecting (MD) scores were significantly associated with some of the Big-5 personality dimensions and tolerance for ambiguity, as well as with search for and presence of meaning. Furthermore, process mediation models showed: (a) synchronicity awareness mediated the relationship between search for meaning and meaning-detecting, and (b) optimism and presence of meaning in life partly mediated the relationship between meaning-detecting and life satisfaction.DiscussionThe findings suggest the importance of synchronicity experiences and hold important conceptual and practical implications for understanding processes of meaning making from unexpected events and their potential contribution to individuals’ well-being.

Activating values intervention: an integrative pathway to well-being

“…Participants were recruited via an online panel—a survey platform acknowledged by the Israeli Bureau of Statistics as representing the Israeli population. Recently, online panels have become a common way to target and reach respondents in social science research (e.g., Russo-Netzer and Icekson, 2022 ). Participants received compensation of $10 for filling in both questionnaires.…”

Experiencing more meaningful coincidences is associated with more real-life creativity? Insights from three empirical studies

“…First, we can assume that positive affect (PA) constitutes a state of a more flexible and broadened thinking style [42,43], which may be ideal for experiencing meaning in random arrangements. Additionally, the sudden perception of meaningful coincidences might enhance peoples' PA [23]. Both directions of the effect should go along with a positive association between PA and meaningful coincidences.…”

“…By applying multilevel models to these micro-longitudinal data, we can differentiate between-person and within-person effects and study cross-sectional and dynamic effects of the experience of meaningful coincidences at the very same time. This is novel in literature, which to date only focused on the interindividual perspective of meaningful coincidences and synchronicity PLOS ONE [2,3,23,[39][40][41]. Therefore, the second aim of study 2 is to investigate the fluctuations in the experience of meaning in everyday life for the very first time.…”

“…Rominger et al [22] found that participants with a higher creative potential perceived a higher number of patterns in randomly arranged stimuli in a figural association task. Furthermore, Russo-Netzer and Icekson [23] reported a link between openness and the experience of meaningful coincidences (see also [20]). To sum up, this pattern of findings adds to the assumption that the experience of meaningful coincidences shares variance with several relevant measures of creativity such as creative ideation behavior, creative potential, as well as openness as the personality trait linked with creativity [24,25].…”

“…First, we investigated if the experience of meaningful coincidences is robustly associated with real-life creativity (as well as creative potential and openness). Second, we evaluated if PA (and NA) could serve a potential reason for the link between real-life creativity [26] and meaningful coincidences [23]. To achieve the second goal and to study potential mechanisms, we went step-by-step (i.e., from study to study) from a trait perspective (i.e., between-person) to a state perspective (i.e., within-person).…”