The Motivation Lab is a dynamic learning community founded in shared values of collaboration, competence, and creativity. Our goal is to move people to live healthier and happier lives. We develop, evaluate and refine evidence-based approaches to make health behavior change enjoyable and efficient.

We use psychological theories to understand how people adapt their thoughts, feelings and actions across contexts, and the impact of those adaptations on their health. We apply technology to reach people in the natural context of their daily lives. We believe less can be more.

Our research generally focuses on change over time. But the specific focus of our research has changed over time. Early studies emphasized achievement motivation, with a particular focus on avoidance motivation during competence pursuits (e.g., fear of failure). More recently, our primary focus has shifted toward understanding:

• within-person dynamics of motivation and health behavior;
• how automatic motivation processes can be targeted to improve health behavior;
• developing just-in-time interventions for promoting health behaviors in daily life (including person-specific decision rules that hold promise for creating a new form of precision behavioral medicine).

• Learn more about our work:
  • Publications indexed on Pubmed
  • Google Scholar list of publications