A Motivational Priorities Model of Life-Ideal Selection: Self-Expansion and Prospective Anxiety in Multinomial Preference Space

People differ not only in how satisfied they are with their lives, but also in what kind of life they ideally want to live. Building on research distinguishing happy, meaningful, and psychologically rich life ideals, this thesis proposes that life-ideal selection is structured by motivational priorities. Across three survey studies and one experiment, I examined whether self-expansion preference, reflecting a growth and transformation orientation, and prospective anxiety, reflecting future-oriented uncertainty sensitivity, predict the relative likelihood of selecting a happy, meaningful, or psychologically rich life. The strongest and most consistent pattern emerged for the Happy versus Psychologically Rich contrast. Across the three survey studies, higher self-expansion decreased the relative likelihood of selecting happiness over psychological richness, whereas higher prospective anxiety increased it. Meaningful versus psychologically rich life was less consistently differentiated by these predictors. Continuous-outcome analyses showed a related but more complex pattern: self-expansion robustly predicted higher experienced richness, happiness, and meaning, whereas intolerance-of-uncertainty components were more closely tied to lower well-being and greater negative affect in some models. A fourth experimental study provided preliminary convergent evidence that growth-oriented framing may shift preferences toward psychological richness relative to happiness, although the key contrast was near the conventional significance threshold. Together, the findings suggest that life-ideal selection is systematically organized by motivational priorities, especially the stability-transformation boundary between happy and psychologically rich lives.