ArticleFrontiers in psychology2021
What Matters Most in Life? A German Cohort Study on the Sources of Meaning and Their Neurobiological Foundations in Four Age Groups.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Cancer patients' perceptions of the meaning in life: a qualitative meta-synthesis.Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer · 2025Pooled it
- Meaning in Life Among Aged People: A Qualitative Study of an Institutionalized Elderly Sample.European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education · 2025Article
- Understanding Wellbeing Profiles According to White Matter Structural Connectivity Sub-types in Early Adolescents: The First Hundred Brains Cohort from the Longitudinal Adolescent Brain Study.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Article
- Review
- The U-Curve of Happiness Revisited: Correlations and Differences in Life Satisfaction Over the Span of Life-An Empirical Evaluation Based on Data From 1,597 Individuals Aged 12-94 in Germany.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Existing work in the field of positive psychology suggests that people can draw meaning from a variety of sources. The present study aimed to identify the most important sources of meaning and to explore the role of age and neural adaptation processes in this context. As part of a large German cohort study, 1,587 individuals between 12 and 94 years were asked to provide a maximum of five responses to the question "What matters most to you in life?" We divided the study population into four age groups and analyzed the obtained answers qualitatively and quantitatively using (1) word clouds and (2) frequency comparisons based on a summarizing content analysis. A chi-squared test was used to test the observed differences between age groups. Identified sources of meaning could be clustered into 16 main and 76 subcategories, with
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