Internship Projects

This is an overview of the research projects that the students who are part of the Experimental Philosophy Lab Group Groningen are working on. 

This project is all about studying the topic of meaning in life.  The aim of the project is to develop an empirical study to investigate the psychological determinants of meaning in life attributions. To do this, we will analyze the concept of meaning in life and the psychological determinants are typically associated with it in the literature. One of the papers that the study is based on, was written by Michael Prinzing (see the picture on the far right) and his colleagues. They investigated the effect of fulfillment, contribution, sensibility, and morality on meaning in life attributions. The results suggest that fulfillment plays an important role in meaning in life attributions, which lead to the development of the current study. 

Our main interest is investigating the relationship between fulfillment and meaning in life. We will examine what fulfillment is and what one derives fulfillment from. Furthermore, we will ask the question whether fulfillment derived from one activity could be more relevant for meaning in life attributions than fulfillment derived from another activity. According to philosophical literature, fulfillment could be linked to hedonic mental states, engagment, and positive evaluative judgment. Through our experiment, we want to find out which of these sources of fulfillment lead to attributions of meaning.