Exploring children's understanding of death: through drawings and the Death Concept Questionnaire.

To investigate whether children's understanding of the concept of death varies as a function of death experience and age, 52 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years (26 had a personal death experience), drew a picture reflecting the meaning of the word death and completed the Death Concept Questionnaire for examination of Human and Animal Death. The results showed that the 2 methodological tools used offered complementary information and that children's understanding of death is related both to age and past experience. Children with death experience seem to have a more realistic understanding of death than their inexperienced age-mates.

Religiosity and psychological well-being.

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between religiosity and psychological well-being in a sample of Greek Orthodox Christians. Previous research has documented that personal devotion, participation in religious activities, and religious salience are positively associated with different criteria of psychological well-being. The sample (83 men and 280 women) with an age range from 18 to 48 years, was strongly skewed with respect to sex (77% female) and education level (95% were university students or university graduates).

Predicting academic self-handicapping in different age groups: the role of personal achievement goals and social goals.

Background: Academic self-handicapping refers to the use of impediments to successful performance on academic tasks. Previous studies have shown that it is related to personal achievement goals. A performance goal orientation is a positive predictor of self-handicapping, whereas a task goal orientation is unrelated to self-handicapping.

Implicit theories of intelligence, perceived academic competence, and school achievement: testing alternative models.

In the present study 3 alternative causal models concerning the relationships between implicit theories of intelligence, perceived academic competence, and school achievement were tested. The direction of changes in implicit theories and perceived competence during early adolescence also was examined. A total of 187 fifth and sixth graders were tested and retested a year later, when they were sixth and seventh graders, respectively.