The basic premise of positive psychology is that the happiness and fulfillment of children and youth entail more than the identification and treatment of their problems. This article provides an overview of positive psychology and the Values in Action (VIA) project that classifies and measures 24 widely recognized character strengths. Good…

Background: The long-term prognosis associated with adolescent symptoms of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in the general population is virtually unknown. In this study, the relationship of early borderline symptoms to subsequent psychosocial functioning and attainment was investigated based on data from the Children in the Community cohort.…

One hundred fifteen undergraduates rated 15 word-cued memories and their 3 most negatively stressful, 3 most positive, and 7 most important events and completed tests of personality and depression. Eighty-nine also recorded involuntary memories online for 1 week. In the first 3-way comparisons needed to test existing theories, comparisons were…

Resident Advisors (RAs) have a significant hand in helping students adjust and thrive in college life. Given the importance of selecting high-performing RAs, this study sought to examine how well various measures of intelligence (e.g., general, emotional) in addition to personality and additional "internal belief" characteristics predict…

Public debates about the role of teachers and teacher performance place teachers at the center of a range of national and local discourses. The notion of teacher professional identity, therefore, framed in a variety of ways, engages people across social contexts, whether as educators, parents, students, taxpayers, voters or consumers of news and…

Background: This study assessed the co-occurrence of cognitive problems and difficult temperament characteristics in children aged 3 to 5 years exhibiting aggressive behavior. Methods: Thirty-one children with high ratings on the Aggressive Behavior subscale of the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist or Teacher Report Form were recruited from a…

Pedhazur and Tetenbaum speculated that factor structures from self-ratings of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) personality traits would be different from factor structures from desirability ratings of the same traits. To explore this hypothesis, both desirability ratings of BSRI traits (both "for a man" and "for a woman") and…

The aim of this paper was to investigate the feasibility and impact of dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) in a clinical outpatient setting. Eighteen clinicians were trained and supervised in using DBT. Twenty-seven female patients were assessed on a number of variables before the treatment,…

Previous research on instruction in higher education suggests that students' personal biases strongly influence their perceptions of professor/instructor effectiveness. However, there is disagreement about the degree and direction of this influence. The present article seeks to contribute to this often conflicting body of work. The researcher…

Purpose: This paper seeks to examine the roles of personality, vocational interests, academic achievement and some socio-cultural factors in educational aspirations of secondary school adolescents in southwestern Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach: A survey research design was adopted. The sample comprised 430 (males = 220, females = 210)…

We examined the risk and protective factors and mental health problems of 105 low SES, urban adolescents whose mothers were coping with alcohol abuse and other drug problems. Approximately half of the mothers were also HIV-infected. As hypothesized, there were few differences between adolescents of HIV-infected and HIV-uninfected mothers in…

The field of moral development has broadened recently from its traditional Kohlbergian emphasis on justice to include other constructs such as caring and forgiveness. The utility of forgiveness has been recognized recently by physicians working with cancer patients, and by therapists interested in anger reduction in clients. This study attempted…

Factor analysis attempts to study how different objects group together to form factors with the purposes of: (1) reducing the number of factorable entities (e.g., variables) with which the researcher needs to deal; (2) searching data for qualitative and quantitative differences; and (3) testing hypotheses (R. Gorsuch, 1983). While most factor…

This paper examines the issue of violence in three settings: (1) outside the home; (2) toward a spouse; and (3) parent-to-child. The social environment dictates greater sanctions against hitting non-family people than it does for hitting family members. Also, those people who are prone to hit outside the family would be more likely to exercise…

Wrightsman has established that assumptions about human nature distinguish religious, occupational, political, gender, and other groups, and that they predict behavior in structured situations. Hjelle and Ziegler proposed a set of nine basic bipolar assumptions about the nature of people: freedom-determinism; rationality-irrationality;…