University of Helsinki
Samantha Heintzelman:
Meaning in Everyday Life
The grandiosity of living a meaningful life is accompanied by more practical features of this experience, such as the process of making sense of one’s world and engaging with the stabilities of life. In this talk, I will present experimental, correlational, and experience sampling research supporting the importance of coherence and routine in the experience of meaning in life. Building on this research, I will provide evidence for the commonality of meaning in life. I will also discuss the meaning-as-information approach, which aims to explain the adaptive nature of this experience by suggesting that feelings of meaning provide unique information about the presence of coherence in the environment and direct cognitive processing accordingly. Together, this research builds a broadened understanding of the experience of meaning in everyday life.