Is a life without meaning satisfying? The moderating role of the search for meaning in satisfaction with life judgments

Results from two studies revealed that the relation between meaning in life and life satisfaction was moderated by the extent to which the rater was searching for meaning in his or her life. In Studies 1a and 1b, the presence of meaning was more strongly related to life satisfaction for those who were actively searching for meaning in life than for those who were not. Study 2 extended the finding to judgments concerning a fictitious target's life satisfaction based on experimentally manipulated information regarding meaning in life. Thus, the role of meaning in life satisfaction judgments varies across individuals, depending on the level of search for meaning in life. These results suggest that search for meaning behaves like a schema increasing the salience of meaning-relevant information, and provides new ways of understanding people's efforts to establish meaningful lives. Keywords: meaning in lifepurpose in lifelife satisfactionwell-beingsearch for meaning Notes 1. One potential explanation for this interaction would be an absence of individuals who are either high in presence and high in search or those who are low in presence and low in search. In concordance with the low correlation between presence and search, cross-tabs analysis using median splits of the two variables revealed that although there were more people in the high presence/low search (N = 38) and low presence/high search pairs (N = 39) than the high/high (N = 22) and low/low (N = 23) pairs, no cells were empty. This was the most uneven distribution among the three samples. Additionally, there was nearly equal variance in presence scores among high (SD = 5.94) and low (SD = 6.19) search groups.