Describes a program at Helen Baller Elementary School in Camus, Washington, called the Comfort Corner, part of the Primary Intervention Program. It provides a safe, supportive place for children who may be experiencing difficulty in classroom, playground, or home situations, by helping them build friendship skills, communication skills, and…

Adolescents are frequently admonished to be socially assertive in order to confront negative interpersonal peer influences. Since the advent of HIV/AIDS in human social chemistry, the admonition has become more critical than ever. But the warning is often proffered in the misguided presumption that social assertiveness is the all-required…

This study furthers the current understanding of optimistic bias regarding youth violence among high school students. Results from a survey of 387 urban high school students indicate a wide range of predictors of optimistic bias, including experience, demographics, and attitudes. Linkages to other developmental frameworks (personal fable and…

The validity of a scale, from the Ontario Health Survey, measuring the subjective sense of well-being, for a large multicultural population in Metropolitan Toronto, is examined through principal components analysis with oblique rotation. Four factors are extracted. Factor 1, is a stress and strain factor, and consists of health worries, feeling…

This investigation focused on the interrelationships among the frequency of cheating behaviors, impulsiveness, personal efficacy, and academic motivation. Sixty-one undergraduate students from a small private Catholic college in the Northeast completed the Academic Integrity Scale, subscales from Kurtines' (1978) Autonomy and Paulus' (1983)…

The authors examined the prediction of occupational attainment by age 40 from contextual and personal variables assessed during childhood and adolescence in 2 participant samples: (a) the Columbia County Longitudinal Study, a study of 856 third graders in a semirural county in New York State that began in 1960, and (b) the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal…

This study tested models of perfectionism predicting psychological distress and academic adjustment and moderators and mediators of those associations in 2 successive cohorts of high-achieving university honors students (N = 499). Participants completed measures earl and late in the semester. Adaptive (high standards) and maladaptive…

This study was designed to develop models for vulnerability to suicidal ideation in bipolar patients. Logistic regression models examined correlates of suicidal ideation in patients who had versus had not attempted suicide previously. Of 477 patients assessed, complete data on demographic, illness history, and personality variables were available…

For this study, the authors developed a multi-item, multi-dimensional scale for peer evaluation encompassing five key dimensions: dependability, task and maintenance orientation, domineering behavior, free-riding behavior, and individual competence. They also tested the relationship between these dimensions and two outcome variables: overall…

Cultures throughout time have marked the passage of young people into adulthood with carefully designed tasks and rituals. The purpose of these activities is to prepare youth to mindfully consider their individual and communal life intention. The relative lack of modern rites of passage for adolescents is seen as having significant implications…

Our first goal was to examine the relations among observational, physiological, and self-report measures of children's anger. Our second goal was to investigate whether these relations varied by reactive or proactive aggression. Children (272 second-grade boys and girls) participated in a procedure in which they lost a game and prize to a…

Three studies examined whether personality-based hardiness would be associated with mental health benefits in contexts of gender discrimination. Hardy women encountering both a laboratory simulation and a hypothetical scenario of discrimination showed greater self-esteem and less negative affect than low hardy women. However, these benefits were…

Background: This study examined the effects of maternal anger, partner transitions and partner conflict on later oppositional and angry behavior of the children of teenage mothers. Methods: One hundred and twenty-one teenage women were interviewed prior to the birth of the baby and at 3 points subsequently, when children were newborn, 7 years old…

Background: Depressive symptoms can be triggered by negative social experiences and individuals' processing of these experiences. This study focuses on the interaction between temperament, perceived parenting, and gender in relation to depressive problems in a Dutch population sample of preadolescents. Methods: The sample consisted of 2230…

In a cross-national replication and extension of prior research with American students, Italian middle and high school students completed measures of interests and competency beliefs relative to a variety of school- and nonschool-related activities. Both interests and competency beliefs tended to show greater adherence to circumplex Realistic,…