A New Look at the Impact of Maximizing on Unhappiness: Two Competing Mediating Effects

The current study aims to explore how the decision-making style of maximizing affects subjective well-being (SWB), which mainly focuses on the confirmation of the mediator role of regret and suppressing role of achievement motivation. A total of 402 Chinese undergraduate students participated in this study, in which they responded to the maximization, regret, and achievement motivation scales and SWB measures. Results suggested that maximizing significantly predicted SWB. Moreover, regret and achievement motivation (hope for success dimension) could completely mediate and suppress this effect. That is, two competing indirect pathways exist between maximizing and SWB. One pathway is through regret. Maximizing typically leads one to regret, which could negatively predict SWB. Alternatively, maximizing could lead to high levels of hope for success, which were positively correlated with SWB. Findings offered a complex method of thinking about the relationship between maximizing and SWB.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Frontiers in Psychology

• Publication date

  2018-02-06

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00066PMID 29467694PMCID 5808237
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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