| Abstract: | Abstract：Subjective well-being is a hot topic in personality and social psychology. In recent years, researchers have paid more and more attention on the effects of individual struggle , main life goals, the content of goals, and other individual subjective initiatives on well-being. Self-determination theory divides human goals into intrinsic goals and extrinsic goals（Deci & Ryan, 2000). Intrinsic goals refer to the goals that reflect our innate growth tendency, including self acceptance, intimacy, physical fitness, etc. Extrinsic goals refer to the goals of gaining external rewards, including striving for wealth, power, status, etc. The theory holds that the pursuit of intrinsic goals leads to higher well-being, while the pursuit of extrinsic goals often leads to lower well-being and poor adaptability. This hypothesis has been supported by numerous studies in different countries (Lekes, Gingras, Philippe, Koestner , & Fang, 2010; Martos & Kopp, 2012; Nishimura & Suzuki, 2016; Romero, Gomez-Fraguela, & Villar, 2011）and using different methods（Hope, Milyavskaya, Holding , & Koestner, 2016；Lekes, Guilbault, Philippe, & Houle, 2014）.However the mechanism between different goal contents and subjective well-being is still unclear . Self-determination theory proposes that we have three innate ,basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness .The reason why intrinsic goals favor well-being ,as the theory suggests, is that they directly satisfy these needs By contrast, extrinsic goal involve obtaining rewards and positive evaluation from others, and do not directly satisfy basic human needs. Therefore investing more in extrinsic goals may not contribute to well-being and may even have a negative effect. However, the empirical evidence on this hypothesis is rare. So the aim of this study is to test the association in Chinese background empirically. Also people with different levels of self-esteem may pursuit different goal contents and the association may be different among them.Specifically the present study constructed a moderated mediation model to investigate whether basic psychological needs mediated the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic goal pursuit and subjective well-being, and whether self-esteem moderated this mediation effect. By convenient sampling, totally 535 college students (182 boys and 353 girls) were recruited to participate in this study. They completed the Aspiration Index, the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction Scale, the Rosenberg self-esteem scale, the Positive Affect Negative Affect Scale,, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. As in previous research (Sheldon & Krieger,2014; Kasser , 2002) , a ‘‘relative intrinsic versus extrinsic value orientation’’ (RIEVO) score was computed by subtracting extrinsic from intrinsic goal scores.The results indicated that: (1) RIEVO significantly positively predicted subjective well-being. (2) basic psychological needs played a partial mediating role between RIEVO and subjective well-being. (3) Self-esteem moderated the first path of the mediated effect of basic psychological needs,. To be more specific, the relationship between RIEVO and basic psychological needs remained significantly for college students with high self-esteem., but became insignificant for those with low self-esteem. Therefore, both mediating and moderating effects existed in the association between RIEVO and subjective well-being. |
