In 2 studies, the authors examined whether relationship goals predict change in social support and trust over time. In Study 1, a group of 199 college freshmen completed pretest and posttest measures of social support and interpersonal trust and completed 10 weekly reports of friendship goals and relationship experiences. Average compassionate goals predicted closeness, clear and connected feel...

BACKGROUND Living with an ostomy requires daily site and equipment care, lifestyle changes, emotional management, and social role adjustments. The Chronic Care Ostomy Self-Management Training Program (CCOSMTP) offers an ostomy self-management curriculum, emphasizing problem solving, self-efficacy, cognitive reframing, and goal setting. OBJECTIVES The qualitative method of content analysis was...

Our actions shape what we learn. Because of this dependency, learners are proficient at choosing their actions to maximize their information gain. But learning often unfolds in social contexts where learners have both informational goals (e.g., to learn how something works) but also social goals (e.g., to appear competent and impress others). How do these different factors shape learners’ decis...

CONTEXT Effective STD and pregnancy prevention efforts should benefit from knowledge of what motivates adolescents to have sex. Positive motivations, and how they differ by gender and sexual experience, are poorly understood. METHODS A sample of 637 ninth graders were asked about their relationship goals, expectations of the degree to which sex would satisfy these goals and sexual experience....

If people's goals and evaluative standards were aligned, then individuals with mastery-based goals should, theoretically, primarily rely on temporal comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to before). In contrast, individuals with performance-based goals should rely on social comparison information (i.e., on how they performed relative to others). However, across three stud...

Valuation ultimately refers to the contribution of an item to meeting a specific goal or objective. Conventional economic valuation is based on the goal of allocative efficiency. But other social goals may be equally, if not more, important. For example, the goals of social fairness and ecological sustainability have been identified as being at least of the same level of importance as allocativ...