ArticleStress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress2024
Purpose in life and stress: Momentary associations from a micro-longitudinal study.
Article in Stress and health : journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Purpose in life and depressive symptoms: An individual-participant meta-analysis of >500,000 participants across six world regions.Journal of affective disorders · 2026Pooled it
- Sense of purpose fluctuations in daily life: A study of young adults and cognitively diverse older adults.Developmental psychology · 2026Article
- Applying a gendered lens to the issue of adolescent social media use and well-being by exploring salient susceptibilities and alternative within-person processes.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Meaning in life and Parkinson's disease: Evidence from a 17-year study across 14 countries.Archives of gerontology and geriatrics · 2026Article
- Personality traits and loneliness: An ecological momentary assessment study with self and partner ratings.Journal of research in personality · 2025Article
- Person, temporal, and contextual predictors of momentary purpose in everyday life.Personality and individual differences · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Purpose in life is an aspect of well-being associated with less subjective stress. The present research sought to expand this literature by testing the association between both dispositional and momentary purpose with stress in daily life using a micro-longitudinal study design. Participants (N = 303) reported their dispositional purpose at baseline and reported their momentary purpose and stress three times a day for 8 days. Between-person, dispositional purpose was associated with less momentary stress across the 8 days tested with linear regression (β = -0.29, 95% CI = -0.39, -18, p < 0.001); it was unrelated to variability in stress (β = 0.05, 95% CI = -0.05, 0.14, p = 0.310). In contrast, the within-person analysis tested with multilevel modelling indicated that in moments when participants felt more purpose-driven than their average, they felt more stressed (b = 0.09, 95% CI = 0.06, 0.12, SE = 0.01, p < 0.001). This association was slightly stronger among participants with relatively lower dispositional purpose (b
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