The current study took a person-centered approach to examine the heterogeneity of changes in children's emotions and persistence during a goal-blocking task and examined how different profiles of emotions and persistence related to children's self-regulation. Children's anger, sadness, and persistence were rated in a goal-blocking task in…

This study aimed to examine the mental health and social-emotional skills of individuals with mathematics difficulties (MD), reading difficulties (RD), and comorbid difficulties (MDRD) in China. Students with MD (n = 35), RD (n = 27), MDRD (n = 43), and typically-developing peers (TD, n = 167) completed the Children's Depression Inventory, the…

Contract cheating -- students outsourcing assignments to ghost-writers and submitting it as their own -- is an issue facing tertiary education institutions globally. Approximately 3% to 11% of higher education students may engage on contract cheating. Understanding why nearly 90% of students do "not" engage in contract cheating is as…

Building on recent research in high performance mindsets and their correlation to high performing people in the workplace, academic success as well as athletic performance, this study aimed to examine the happiness of high performing people. This study examines the relationship between the noncognitive skills of self-awareness, self-discipline,…

Although the functionalist perspective on emotional development posits that emotions serve adaptive functions, empirical tests of the role of anger mostly focus on how anger contributes to dysfunction. Developmentally, as children gain agency and skill at emotion regulation between the ages of 36 months and 48 months, their modulation of anger may…

The aim of the present study was to investigate a think aloud protocol as a novel way to measure indicators of self-control during acts of physical persistence. Using a within-person design, 35 participants (9 males, 26 females) completed two wall-sit persistence tasks, one employing a think aloud protocol, and the other silent. A two-way mixed…

The purpose of this study was to explore and assess the feasibility of counselling based on life-design principles in enhancing the career resilience of children who are exposed to family violence. The research project involved a qualitative-quantitative mode of inquiry with 6 participants chosen based on certain characteristics.…

Our UC Santa Barbara research team engages in ongoing efforts to enhance and validate the Social Emotional Health Surveys (Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education). The initiative to enhance the secondary version is supported by an Institute of Education Sciences grant (#R305A160157, 2016-2020), which provides funding to refine, standardize, and…

This manual reports on the development and validation of the original Social Emotional Health Survey-Secondary (carried out between 2012 and 2017). We shared the first version of the SEHS-S because it had sufficient validation evidence based on research completed by 2015; hence, the form reported on in this manual is called the SEHS-S (2015)…

Marginalized boys at risk of dropping out of high school have for a long time been a problem in the Western world. 100 such Danish 14-16 year old boys were in the summers of 2013, 2014 and 2015 exposed to a new school program, "The Boys Academy," inspired by Seligman and the American KIPP schools suggesting seven character strengths to…

The experimental analysis of behavior has identified several molar functional relations that are highly relevant to clinical behavior analysis. These include matching, discounting, momentum, and variability. Matching provides a broader analysis of how multiple sources of reinforcement influence how individuals choose to allocate their time and…

Background: Individual differences in conduct problems arise in part from proneness to anger/frustration and poor self-regulation of behavior. However, the genetic and environmental etiology of these connections is not known. Method: Using a twin design, we examined genetic and environmental covariation underlying the well-documented correlations…