Questão 2716632

A New Dimension to a Meaningful Life

When we think about lives filled with meaning, we often focus on people whose grand contributions benefited humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela surely felt they had a _________ life. But how about us ordinary people, toiling away in a typical existence?

Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the ________ of clear and satisfying long-term goals and the belief that one’s life matters in the grand scheme of things. Psychologists call these three things coherence, purpose and existential mattering.

But we believe there is another element to consider. Think about the first _________ you stop to admire after a long winter or imagine the scenery atop a hill after a fresh hike. Sometimes existence delivers us small moments of beauty. When people are open to appreciating such experiences, these moments may enhance how they view their life. We call this element experiential appreciation. The phenomenon reflects the feeling of a deep connection to events as they transpire and the ability to extract value from that link. It represents the detection of and admiration for life’s inherent beauty.

We recently set out to better understand this form of appreciation in a series of studies, published in Nature Human Behaviour, that involved more than 3,000 participants. Across these studies, we were interested in whether experiential appreciation was related to a person’s sense of meaning even when we accounted for the effects of the classic trio of coherence, purpose and existential mattering. If so, experiential appreciation could be a unique contributor to meaningfulness and not simply a product of these other variables.

As an initial test of our idea, we had participants rate their endorsement of different coping strategies to relieve their stress. We found that people who managed stress by focusing on their appreciation for life’s beauty also reported experiencing life as highly meaningful.

(Fonte: Scientific American - Adaptado).

Concerning the parts of speech, the word underlined in “experiential appreciation could be a unique contributor to meaningfulness and not simply a product of these other variables” is classified as: