Ongoing Research Projects

Our current empirical focus is on the transition to adulthood under different societal conditions in the United States and Germany and in different social, cultural, and ethnic groups. We study academic motivation, control striving, thriving and failing, the effectiveness of motivation and control-related interventions in community college and 4-year college students. We investigate the way in which young people come to understand and develop goals for their position in society. We examine how young people manage to stay goal engaged with difficult tasks and come to decide to disengage from unsolvable tasks, and what role it is that peer behavior and positive and negative affect play in such goal engagement and disengagement. Finally, a new project addresses motivational self-regulation as a potentially crucial link between individual genetic differences and life-span developmental outcomes.