American Catholics reported a greater sense of meaning in life after Pope Leo XIV’s election, study finds

The election of Pope Leo XIV in May 2025 was followed by a modest rise in the sense of meaning in life among a sample of practicing Roman Catholics in the United States, according to a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology. Through the end of the study’s 10-day post-election window, participants reported a stronger sense that their lives had meaning, along with a gradual decline in their search for meaning. The pattern held after the researchers accounted for participants’ religious commitment and their feelings about the new pope sharing their American nationality.

In psychology, meaning in life refers to the subjective judgment that one’s existence is worthwhile, makes sense, and is guided by an overarching purpose. Psychologists break this concept down into three parts: having a motivational goal or purpose, feeling that life is coherent, and believing that one’s life matters. Rather than treating meaning as a single feeling, researchers distinguish between the presence of meaning and the search for meaning. As a 2006 validation study demonstrated, already feeling that one’s life has purpose is distinct from actively looking for something that makes life feel meaningful.

Religion is a major source of this sense of purpose for many people. For example, a 2005 study found that religious people tend to report greater well-being, largely because they feel their lives have purpose and direction. Similarly, a study covered by PsyPost in 2022 indicated that religious individuals tend to experience a stronger sense of meaning largely through feeling that they matter on a grand, cosmic scale.

Most psychological research on religion and meaning has examined steady, long-term beliefs rather than specific religious events. One of the most prominent rituals in the Roman Catholic tradition is the papal conclave, the secluded meeting of cardinals inside the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope. Filled with symbolic traditions like burning ballots to send black or white smoke from a chimney and the Latin announcement of “Habemus Papam” (“We have a Pope”), the conclave is framed by the Church as a moment of divine guidance.

The research, led by Stefan Stieger of Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Austria, examined whether living through this major religious transition alters how Catholics experience meaning from day to day. The authors drew on three psychological frameworks to explain how a papal election might affect believers. Under the meaning-making model, the death of a pope may create a temporary spiritual void that disrupts a believer’s worldview, and electing a successor may help restore a sense of order and coherence.

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Social identity theory offers a second perspective, suggesting that people derive self-worth from belonging to social groups; losing a leader can threaten that shared identity, whereas choosing a new leader may restore group unity. A third possibility involves emotional contagion, the tendency for feelings to spread rapidly across a crowd or through global media coverage. For instance, a 2024 field study of a public Hindu ritual found that participants who stood close to one another during the ceremony experienced synchronized emotional arousal, showing how collective religious practices can align feelings across a group.

To capture how the 2025 papal transition affected believers in real time, the researchers used an experience sampling method. Instead of asking people to recall their feelings weeks later, this technique prompts participants to answer short smartphone surveys during their normal daily routines, reducing memory biases. Beginning on May 3, 2025, four full days before the conclave started, the team tracked participants across 14 consecutive days covering the pre-conclave, conclave, and post-conclave phases.

The researchers recruited English-speaking United States citizens through the online platform Prolific who identified as practicing Roman Catholics. After excluding 17 individuals who did not identify as Roman Catholic, dropped out early, or provided inconsistent demographic data, the final sample consisted of 117 American Roman Catholics. Participants ranged in age from 19 to 76 years, with an average age of about 45, and were split nearly evenly between men (52.1 percent) and women (47.9 percent).

At the start of the study, participants installed an open-source smartphone app called ESMira and completed a baseline survey. On 1-to-100 scales, the group reported being fairly religious on average (72.7) and relatively balanced between conservative and progressive views in both their theological orientation (46.1) and political views (47.4). They also completed a 10-item questionnaire measuring both their private religious devotion and their involvement in their church community.

Every evening at 8:00 p.m. local time, the app prompted participants to complete an end-of-day survey assessing their current sense of meaning in life. Using a 7-point scale from 1 (absolutely untrue) to 7 (absolutely true), participants rated five statements about the presence of meaning (such as “At this moment, I understand my life’s meaning”) and five statements about the search for meaning (such as “At this moment, I am looking for something that makes my life feel meaningful”). Across the two-week window, the 117 participants completed 1,470 daily questionnaires.

When the cardinals elected Pope Leo XIV, an unexpected factor emerged: the new head of the Catholic Church was also from the United States. To help account for the possibility that any boost in meaning among the American participants was a byproduct of national pride, the researchers added a question to the final survey. Participants rated how much Pope Leo XIV’s American background influenced their feelings toward him on a scale from -4 (much more negative) to +4 (much more positive).

To analyze the daily ratings, the researchers divided the timeline into a four-day pre-conclave baseline, the conclave phase (from the first black smoke signal until the day before the election), and 10 post-conclave days starting with the day of the papal announcement. Using multilevel statistical models, they tracked daily changes within each individual while controlling for age, gender, personal and social religious commitment, and feelings about the pope’s American nationality.

Across the four pre-conclave baseline days, participants averaged 5.16 out of 7 on the presence of meaning and 4.34 out of 7 on the search for meaning. During the conclave itself and on the first day of the post-conclave phase (the day Pope Leo XIV was announced), neither dimension showed a notable shift from baseline, possibly because not all participants had heard the news before completing that first evening survey. Starting the day after the election, however, the presence of meaning rose above the pre-conclave baseline and stayed elevated through the final day of tracking.

On the 7-point scale, daily presence-of-meaning scores increased by 0.14 to 0.20 points above the 5.16 baseline on every day from Day 2 through Day 10, except for Day 8, when a 0.09-point increase was not statistically significant. Standardized effect sizes during this period ranged from 0.09 to 0.14, which the authors describe as small to medium; in raw terms, the increases amounted to roughly 3 to 4 percent of the baseline score.

At the same time, participants reported a gradual decline in their search for meaning, with statistically significant drops on Days 2, 7, 9, and 10. Compared to the 4.34 baseline, search-for-meaning scores fell by 0.23 points on Day 7, 0.34 points on Day 9, and 0.30 points on Day 10, with standardized effect sizes reaching -0.19 on Day 9 and -0.17 on Day 10. This pattern suggests that participants felt more settled in their sense of purpose and less driven to look for missing meaning.

These shifts held after the researchers accounted for age, gender, religious commitment, and feelings about the pope’s nationality. On average, participants viewed the pope’s American nationality positively (averaging 2.03 on the -4 to +4 scale), and those more active in church communities tended to feel warmer about it. However, the analysis adjusted for these factors rather than testing whether the post-election boost was larger or smaller for particular groups, so it cannot show whether less devout Catholics, or those less enthusiastic about an American pope, experienced the same shift.

The authors noted that their findings are compatible with all three psychological frameworks they examined. They suggest that emotional contagion from widespread media coverage may have contributed, and that because media excitement typically fades, the persistence of the effect, with the drop in searching for meaning strongest on Days 9 and 10, points to deeper social identity and meaning-making processes as well. They also acknowledge, however, that emotional contagion can sometimes last several days, so the line between these explanations is not sharp.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study does not appear to have been preregistered. Because it began just four days before the conclave, after the death of Pope Francis had already occurred, there is no way to know what the participants’ sense of meaning looked like before the papal vacancy began. The post-election increase in meaning might represent a genuine rise above their typical everyday levels, or a rebound back to normal after a temporary dip caused by the previous pope’s death.

In addition, the tracking period ended 10 days after the election, leaving open the question of how long the heightened sense of purpose lasted before leveling off. The study also focused solely on Roman Catholics in the United States and had no comparison group tracked over the same days, so it cannot rule out that scores would have drifted for other reasons, such as participants growing accustomed to answering the same questions each evening.

Because the new pope’s American nationality became known at the same moment as his election, the study also cannot fully separate a religious response from a patriotic one. Including people from other religious backgrounds exposed to the same news coverage would help future researchers separate media-driven emotional contagion from the spiritual effects of welcoming a new religious leader.

The study, “The election of Pope Leo XIV and its impact on the meaning of life for Roman Catholic Christians: A longitudinal experience sampling method study in the USA before, during, and after the pope’s election,” was authored by Stefan Stieger, Selina Volsa, and David Willinger.