COVID-19 upended lives worldwide, impacting hopes and dreams as well as disrupting goals. Hayley Svensson, a fourth-year graduate student in the social psychology doctoral program at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, wanted to examine how the pandemic impacted people’s pursuit of personal and professional goals.
Svensson, whose paper on the matter was published in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass, examined how experiencing the difficulty of making adjustments amid disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic relates to how we think, feel about and achieve our goals. Svensson and her collaborators conducted two studies involving participants who were primarily undergraduate students. In both studies, participants completed an online survey where they answered questions about their goals during the pandemic and personal characteristics. To read the full story.