Commentary: goal disengagement—past, processes, and future

Heckhausen, Jutta; Wrosch, Carsten

doi:10.1007/s11031-022-09981-y

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Studies of this phenomenon show that depression often fades when a major goal is truly given up 383 , and that people capable of giving up major goals are protected against depression 384 . It is also clear that mood is influenced not by success or failure, but by rate of progress towards a valued goal 385‐390 .…”

Section: Depression and Low Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges

Nesse

2023

World Psychiatry

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Evolutionary biology provides a crucial foundation for medicine and behavioral science that has been missing from psychiatry. Its absence helps to explain slow progress; its advent promises major advances. Instead of offering a new kind of treatment, evolutionary psychiatry provides a scientific foundation useful for all kinds of treatment. It expands the search for causes from mechanistic explanations for disease in some individuals to evolutionary explanations for traits that make all members of a species vulnerable to disease. For instance, capacities for symptoms such as pain, cough, anxiety and low mood are universal because they are useful in certain situations. Failing to recognize the utility of anxiety and low mood is at the root of many problems in psychiatry. Determining if an emotion is normal and if it is useful requires understanding an individual's life situation. Conducting a review of social systems, parallel to the review of systems in the rest of medicine, can help achieve that understanding. Coping with substance abuse is advanced by acknowledging how substances available in modern environments hijack chemically mediated learning mechanisms. Understanding why eating spirals out of control in modern environments is aided by recognizing the motivations for caloric restriction and how it arouses famine protection mechanisms that induce binge eating. Finally, explaining the persistence of alleles that cause serious mental disorders requires evolutionary explanations of why some systems are intrinsically vulnerable to failure. The thrill of finding functions for apparent diseases is evolutionary psychiatry's greatest strength and weakness. Recognizing bad feelings as evolved adaptations corrects psychiatry's pervasive mistake of viewing all symptoms as if they were disease manifestations. However, viewing diseases such as panic disorder, melancholia and schizophrenia as if they are adaptations is an equally serious mistake in evolutionary psychiatry. Progress will come from framing and testing specific hypotheses about why natural selection left us vulnerable to mental disorders. The efforts of many people over many years will be needed before we will know if evolutionary biology can provide a new paradigm for understanding and treating mental disorders.

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Section: Depression and Low Moodmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges

Nesse

2023

World Psychiatry

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“…Therefore, the aim of this special issue is to assemble diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to display the status quo of current research and identify future avenues for this rather neglected research topic. Moreover, we have invited several established goal researchers to comment on the empirical articles of this special issue and thereby to extend the scope of the considered theories (Heckhausen & Wrosch, 2022;Oettingen & Gollwitzer, 2022). In this introductory paper, we will first outline different conceptualizations of goal disengagement.…”

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confidence: 99%

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

Kappes

Schattke

2022

Motiv Emot

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While research on tenacious goal pursuit and persistence has evoked a myriad of research efforts, research on goal disengagement has rather been neglected and has been focusing mainly on positive consequences of individual differences in goal disengagement capacities. In recent years, however, research on goal disengagement has seen an upsurge in studies, specifically addressing the conceptualization of goal disengagement, the processes involved, and factors facilitating or undermining it. However, many questions remain unanswered or only partly answered providing numerous opportunities for further investigation.With this special issue of Motivation and Emotion, we aim to stimulate such progress in research on goal disengagement. To this end, this special issue includes empirical studies with cross-sectional, prospective, longitudinal, and experimental designs with a wide range of personal and experimentally induced goals as well as invited commentaries from scholars across different psychological sub disciplines.In this introductory essay, we provide a brief review of the current state of goal disengagement research. We also provide an overview about the contributions to this special issue with reflections related to the current state of research and areas where further advancement in conceptualization and empirical studies is needed.

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Growth goals: A review of the construct, predictors, consequences, and intervention

Martin

2024

Advances in Motivation Science

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Commentary: goal disengagement—past, processes, and future

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges

Evolutionary psychiatry: foundations, progress and challenges

You have to let go sometimes: advances in understanding goal disengagement

Growth goals: A review of the construct, predictors, consequences, and intervention

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