Personality strengths in romantic relationships: Measuring perceptions of benefits and costs and their impact on personal and relational well-being.

Three studies using samples of people in romantic relationships were conducted to create a new individual difference measure of partner strengths in couples. The 2 perceptions of partner strengths included (1) appreciation of their use and effectiveness and (2) recognition of costs associated with their use. Factor analyses supported 2-factors and we found that greater appreciation of partner strengths predicted greater relationship satisfaction, commitment, investment, intimacy, self-expansion, and support for goal pursuit; recognizing significant costs with partner strengths was inversely related to several outcomes.

Personality Strengths as Resilience: A One-Year Multiwave Study.

We examined how personality strengths prospectively predict reactions to negative life events. Participants were 797 community adults from 42 countries. At five points over the course of 1 year, participants completed a series of questionnaires measuring seven personality strengths (hope, grit, meaning in life, curiosity, gratitude, control beliefs, and use of strengths), subjective well-being, and frequency and severity of negative life events.

Experiential avoidance and well-being: a daily diary analysis.

Experiential avoidance (EA) is a regulatory strategy characterised by efforts to control or avoid unpleasant thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. Most studies of EA have used trait measures without considering the effects of EA on psychological functioning in naturalistic settings. To address this gap, we used daily diary methodology to examine the influence of EA of anxiety on everyday well-being.

Relationships between meaning in life, social and achievement events, and positive and negative affect in daily life.

Research on meaning in life has generally focused on global meaning judgments. This study examined how people's daily experiences, represented by events that occur in daily life, influence their perceived sense of meaning on a daily basis. One hundred sixty-two college students completed daily reports for 2 weeks.

A contextual approach to experiential avoidance and social anxiety: evidence from an experimental interaction and daily interactions of people with social anxiety disorder.

Experiential avoidance (EA), the tendency to avoid internal, unwanted thoughts and feelings, is hypothesized to be a risk factor for social anxiety. Existing studies of experiential avoidance rely on trait measures with minimal contextual consideration. In two studies, we examined the association between experiential avoidance and anxiety within real-world social interactions.

Perceived responsiveness during an initial social interaction with a stranger predicts a positive memory bias one week later.

Prior research has found that perceiving positive responses from others following self-disclosures enhances social bonds and plays a role in the maintenance of romantic relationships. We sought to extend this effect by exploring perceived responsiveness to good news in the context of initial social interactions with a stranger. In this study, unacquainted college students (n = 106) participated in a 45-minute semi-structured social interaction, and information on their emotions and behaviours was collected immediately after and one week later.

The iron status of children and youth in a community mental health clinic is lower than that of a national sample.

Objective: Iron plays a key role in brain function, and a deficiency of iron has been implicated in various cognitive, motor, and psychiatric disorders. Because of recent evidence that iron deficiency may be related to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and other psychiatric disorders, the goal of this study was to compare the iron status of children and youth seen in a community mental health clinic with a national sample of same-aged subjects.

Methods: In this study, a consecutive series of 108 patients (79 males) referred to a community mental health clinic was compared with a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) sample on measures of iron status.