Research in the Self-Control & Cognition Lab examines determinants of people's goals and the processes by which people then orient their attention and action to goal-relevant information. Our work spans levels of analysis including broad bases of motivation, goal initiation, goal-related affect and affect regulation, and fine-grained modulation of cognitive control.

In studies of motivational states and orientations, one major contribution of our work has been the conceptualization of abstract and concrete mindsets (Freitas, Gollwitzer, and Trope, 2004), the manipulation of which has been used in many independent laboratories. The key insight of this work is that motivational states activated in a particular context can carry over to affect how people construe new information, which can affect a variety of goal-related processes, including perceived goal substitutability (Clark & Freitas, 2013), self-reported completion of physical-exercise goals (Sweeney & Freitas, 2016), and motivation for healthy eating (Sweeney & Freitas, 2018).

In studies of lower-level mechanisms of cognitive control, we have made contributions to understanding how people adapt the control of action and cognition to fluctuating environmental demands. For example, sometimes environmental demands are relatively low, and we can allow our actions to unfold relatively automatically, whereas other times we need to exercise much more selectivity in what we attend to and what we do. Our research suggests that people address these shifting demands through engaging mechanisms of cognitive control, such as selective attention, that then facilitate how they handle newly encountered events (Feldman & Freitas, 2016; Freitas, Bahar, Yang, & Banai, 2007; Freitas & Clark, 2015).

Methodologically, our research examines goal-related phenomena by using multiple levels of analysis, including intensive-longitudinal designs (Sweeney & Freitas, 2019), short-term interventions (Sweeney & Freitas, 2016), laboratory studies of memory (Culcea & Freitas, 2017), emotion-regulation-choice protocols (Feldman & Freitas, in press), and studies of electrocortical responses (e.g., Freitas, Azizian, Leung, & Squires, 2007; Feldman, Clark, & Freitas, 2015; Weimer, Clark, & Freitas, 2019).