Laura King

Introduction

Laura A. King is an American personality and social psychologist whose work has made meaning in life a central topic of mainstream personality science. A Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, she has spent three decades studying how ordinary people decide whether their lives are good, what makes experience feel meaningful, and how narrative, goals and moral identity contribute to well-being. Her best-known experimental paradigm, the "best possible self" writing exercise, has become one of the most widely tested positive psychology interventions.

King's signature argument is deliberately counter-intuitive. Against a tradition that treats meaning as rare, hard-won and easily lost, she has assembled evidence that most people already report high levels of meaning, that meaning is generated by quite ordinary experiences such as routine, social connection and coherence, and that many widely held beliefs about meaning are simply mistaken. That argument has made her a central reference point in debates about how to define and measure the good life, and it has drawn scrutiny from researchers who think the field has moved too fast from small laboratory inductions to claims about flourishing.

Early Life and Education

King did her undergraduate work at Kenyon College, where she began as an English literature major and added a second major in psychology in the second semester of her junior year, graduating in 1986 with honours in both. That combination of literary and psychological training has remained visible in her research, which relies heavily on narrative method, on close attention to the language people use about their lives, and on the idea that a life story is a psychological object rather than a mere report.

She did graduate work at Michigan State University before moving to the University of California, Davis, where she took an M.A. and then, in 1991, a PhD in personality psychology. Her training came at a moment when personality psychology was recovering from the situationism debates and when the scientific study of well-being was being revitalised by work on subjective well-being and on the psychology of goals and self-regulation.

Academic and Professional Career

King began her career at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she spent roughly a decade and received multiple teaching awards. In 2001 she moved to the University of Missouri, where she is now a Curators' Distinguished Professor and directs the Personality Dynamics Lab. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation.

Alongside her empirical work she has occupied an unusual number of editorial and leadership positions. She was the first woman to edit the Personality Processes and Individual Differences section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, served as editor of the Journal of Research in Personality, was editor-in-chief of Perspectives on Psychological Science, and is a past president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Her honours include the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001, the Ed and Carol Diener Award for Distinguished Midcareer Contributions to Personality Psychology in 2011, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's award for distinguished service in 2015, and the Jack Block Award for Distinguished Research in Personality Psychology in 2018.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Meaning in life as an ordinary experience

King's most influential claim is that meaning is not scarce. With Samantha Heintzelman she argued in a 2014 American Psychologist article that meaning in life is typically reported at high levels, that it tracks a small set of detectable features of experience such as coherence, purpose and social connection, and that the sensation of meaning functions as a rough but useful signal that one's life is going well. In a widely cited 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article with Joshua Hicks, she surveyed the field and argued that several popular beliefs, including the idea that meaning must be found through suffering or through a single grand purpose, are not supported by data.

The best possible self intervention

In a 2001 study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, King asked undergraduates to write for twenty minutes a day across four days, either about their best possible future selves, about a traumatic experience, or about a neutral topic. Those who wrote about a hoped-for future showed gains in subjective well-being and, over the following months, made fewer visits to the student health centre than controls, and they found the task far less distressing than writing about trauma. The paradigm has since been adopted widely as a brief, low-cost positive intervention.

Narrative, goals and the good life

Across a long programme of work, King has studied how people construct life stories, how goals organise experience, and how people judge their own happiness. She and Chesley Napa asked ordinary adults what makes a life good, finding that lay answers emphasise meaning and moral goodness more than the happiness that researchers typically measure. She has also shown that well-being judgments are constructed on the spot and are sensitive to apparently irrelevant contextual cues, which complicates any simple reading of self-report happiness data.

Goals, regret and maturity

A related strand of her work concerns how people relate to experiences they have lost. With Joshua Hicks she studied regret, finding that the capacity to salvage meaning from roads not taken increases with age and is associated with maturity rather than with rumination, and she has used "lost and found" designs in which participants write about an experience they once feared losing or a possession they have lost, in order to observe meaning-making under controlled conditions.

Meaning, morality and ideology

In more recent work King has examined the uncomfortable side of meaning. Studies with her students and collaborators have found that exposure to authoritarian values can raise feelings of meaning while lowering positive affect, that religious fundamentalism and right-wing authoritarianism predict a distinctive profile of meaning, and that people can derive a sense of purpose from worldviews that also increase prejudice. This work extends her long-standing interest in how happiness and morality relate, and it complicates any assumption that meaning is intrinsically benign.

Hope as a distinct emotion

Since 2021 King's laboratory has concentrated on hope, and on the claim that it is not merely a cognitive estimate of whether one's goals are attainable. Working with Megan Edwards and colleagues, she published a six-study paper in Emotion in 2025 (25(6), 1365–1380) with a combined sample of 2,312 participants. Across cross-sectional, daily-diary and five-wave longitudinal designs — the diary sample Chinese, the others mostly White American — hope predicted a sense of meaning after controlling for other positive emotions and for the agency and pathways components that standard hope scales measure. In the longitudinal study hope was the only positive emotion that predicted meaning at later waves.

The paper is careful about its own limits, and the limits are instructive. Two experiments tested whether inducing a hopeful or cheerful mood would raise meaning directly; neither did. The effect of the manipulation on meaning ran indirectly, through how hopeful participants felt. King and her colleagues treat this as evidence that hope is doing the causal work, but it is equally a reminder of how hard it is to move meaning in a laboratory, which is the same problem that dogs the best possible self literature. Related work from the lab has extended the hope programme to purpose following childhood adversity and, with awe, to the self.

Major Publications

King, L. A., & Napa, C. K. (1998). What Makes a Life Good? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(1).
King, L. A. (2001). The Health Benefits of Writing About Life Goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(5).
King, L. A., & Hicks, J. A. (2007). Whatever Happened to "What Might Have Been"? American Psychologist, 62(7).
Heintzelman, S. J., & King, L. A. (2014). Life Is Pretty Meaningful. American Psychologist, 69(6).
King, L. A., & Hicks, J. A. (2021). The Science of Meaning in Life. Annual Review of Psychology, 72.
King, L. A. (2016). The Science of Psychology: An Appreciative View (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Impact and Legacy

King's influence runs through both the substance and the institutions of personality psychology. Her work helped shift the study of meaning from philosophy and clinical writing into mainstream individual-differences research, and the best possible self exercise is now a standard tool in applied positive psychology, used in classrooms, workplaces and clinical settings. As an editor and society president she has been an advocate for methodological reform and for diversity in the field.

Her claims have also been tested hard, and the results are mixed. The best possible self intervention is probably the best-evidenced finding associated with her name, and a 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis by Carrillo and colleagues, pooling twenty-nine studies, reported moderate effects on well-being, optimism and positive affect. But a later meta-analysis by Heekerens and Heinitz, covering thirty-four randomized trials, found that the effect on positive affect was substantially larger when measured on the final day of the intervention than days later, that it was much larger for state than for trait-like measures, that trait optimism effects were slightly negative, and that there were no substantial effects a week or more afterwards. That analysis also noted that more than a third of the contributing studies had not blinded experimenters and that the funnel plot for positive affect was asymmetric, suggesting publication bias. A classroom study published in 2021 failed to find long-term benefits of the exercise in a real-world undergraduate setting, and its authors argued that laboratory success does not guarantee effect outside controlled conditions.

King and her collaborators have offered two responses. First, they treat meaning as a multi-component construct, so that a brief writing exercise should be expected to move mood and state optimism rather than deep-seated traits, and they have published evidence that the exercise works partly by elaborating goal schemas rather than by inducing positive emotion. Second, they argue that the ordinary-person framing is itself a corrective: if most people already score high on meaning, then the appropriate aim of research is not to raise a global trait but to understand which features of daily experience sustain or erode it.

The hope programme, her current one, inherits all of these problems and adds a new one. It rests almost entirely on self-report, and the two cultures it samples — American and Chinese — are the same narrow contrast that limits the rest of cultural and personality research. Claiming that one emotion out of many predicts meaning is a stronger claim than the design can comfortably carry when meaning itself is measured by asking people how meaningful their lives are, and when the experimental half of the paper produced only indirect effects.

A second line of criticism concerns measurement. Because nearly all work on meaning, including King's, relies on self-report, critics argue that the field risks studying the semantics of the word "meaning" rather than a psychological state. King's own research on how well-being judgments are constructed supplies part of the answer, since it documents exactly how context-dependent those judgments are, but it does not resolve the question of what they refer to. Her recent turn to the darker correlates of meaning, showing that a sense of purpose can accompany authoritarianism and prejudice, is in part a response to critics who charge positive psychology with celebrating whatever makes people feel good.

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References

King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(7), 798-807.