Psychosocial interventions and posttraumatic growth: a meta-analysis.

Objective: People commonly report growth after adversity. Can psychosocial intervention facilitate posttraumatic growth (PTG)?

Method: This meta-analysis assesses the relationship between intervention participation and PTG using published and unpublished reports located with the database PsycINFO. Eligible studies included randomized controlled trials (k = 12) that provided a psychosocial intervention to people who had experienced an identifiable hardship or trauma (N = 1,171).

Unpacking grit: Motivational correlates of perseverance and passion for long-term goals.

In two cross-sectional studies, we explored the motivational orientations correlates of the character strength of grit and its two component facets: perseverance of effort and consistency of interests over time. Specifically, we examined how individual differences in grit are explained by distinct approaches to pursuing happiness in life: in immediately hedonically positive activities, in activities that serve a higher, altruistic purpose, and in attention-absorbing activities. In both samples, grit demonstrated medium-sized associations with an orientation toward engagement, small-to-medium associations with an orientation toward meaning, and small-to-medium (inverse) associations with an orientation toward pleasure.

Parent predictors of adolescents' explanatory style.

The current study tested the prospective relations (six month lag) between three aspects of the parent-child relationship at Time 1 (T1) and adolescents' explanatory styles at Time 2 (T2): caregiving behaviors, parents' explanatory style for their own negative events, and parents' explanatory style for their children's negative events. The sample included 129 adolescents aged 11 to 14 years at baseline and their parents. Adolescents reported on their own explanatory style and their parents' caregiving behaviors; parents self-reported on their caregiving behaviors and their explanatory style for their own and their children's events.

The Person-Event Data Environment: leveraging big data for studies of psychological strengths in soldiers.

The Department of Defense (DoD) strives to efficiently manage the large volumes of administrative data collected and repurpose this information for research and analyses with policy implications. This need is especially present in the United States Army, which maintains numerous electronic databases with information on more than one million Active-Duty, Reserve, and National Guard soldiers, their family members, and Army civilian employees. The accumulation of vast amounts of digitized health, military service, and demographic data thus approaches, and may even exceed, traditional benchmarks for Big Data.

Vindicating virtue: a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology.

This article provides a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology. It first outlines the details and results from four paradigmatic studies in psychology that situationists have heavily drawn upon in their critique of the Aristotelian conception of virtuous characteristics, including studies conducted by Hartshorne and May (1928), Darley and Batson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27:100-108, 1973), Isen and Levin (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21:384-388, 1972), and Milgram (Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67:371-378, 1963). It then presents ten problems with the way situationists have used these studies to challenge Aristotelian moral psychology.

Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: the open-vocabulary approach.

We analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. In our open-vocabulary technique, the data itself drives a comprehensive exploration of language that distinguishes people, finding connections that are not captured with traditional closed-vocabulary word-category analyses. Our analyses shed new light on psychosocial processes yielding results that are face valid (e.

Disseminating self-help: positive psychology exercises in an online trial.

Background: The recent growth of positive psychology has led to a proliferation in exercises to increase positive thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Preliminary evidence suggests that these exercises hold promise as an approach for reducing depressive symptoms. These exercises are typically researched in isolation as single exercises.

What Leaves Behind: The Roles of IQ and Self-Control in Predicting Standardized Achievement Test Scores and Report Card Grades.

The increasing prominence of standardized testing to assess student learning motivated the current investigation. We propose that standardized achievement test scores assess competencies determined more by intelligence than by self-control, whereas report card grades assess competencies determined more by self-control than by intelligence. In particular, we suggest that intelligence helps students learn and solve problems independent of formal instruction, whereas self-control helps students study, complete homework, and behave positively in the classroom.

Music, neuroscience, and the psychology of well-being: a précis.

In Flourish, the positive psychologist Seligman (2011) identifies five commonly recognized factors that are characteristic of human flourishing or well-being: (1) "positive emotion," (2) "relationships," (3) "engagement," (4) "achievement," and (5) "meaning" (p. 24). Although there is no settled set of necessary and sufficient conditions neatly circumscribing the bounds of human flourishing (Seligman, 2011), we would mostly likely consider a person that possessed high levels of these five factors as paradigmatic or prototypical of human flourishing.

Building resilience.

Failure is a familiar trauma in life, but its effects on people differ widely. Some reel, recover, and move on with their lives; others get bogged down by anxiety, depression, and fear of the future. Seligman, who is known as the father of positive psychology, has spent three decades researching failure, helplessness, and optimism.

Self-controlled children stay leaner in the transition to adolescence.

In a prospective longitudinal study, we examined whether the personality trait of self-control protects against weight gain during the transition from childhood to adolescence. We obtained multi-method, multi-source measures of self-control from a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 105 fifth-grade students. Height and weight were recorded by the school nurse and used to calculate age- and gender-specific standardized body mass index (BMI) z-scores.

Positive psychology in clinical practice.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits, and the institutions that facilitate their development. A field concerned with well-being and optimal functioning, positive psychology aims to broaden the focus of clinical psychology beyond suffering and its direct alleviation. Our proposed conceptual framework parses happiness into three domains: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

Positive psychotherapy.

Positive psychotherapy (PPT) contrasts with standard interventions for depression by increasing positive emotion, engagement, and meaning rather than directly targeting depressive symptoms. The authors have tested the effects of these interventions in a variety of settings. In informal student and clinical settings, people not uncommonly reported them to be "life-changing.

Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents.

In a longitudinal study of 140 eighth-grade students, self-discipline measured by self-report, parent report, teacher report, and monetary choice questionnaires in the fall predicted final grades, school attendance, standardized achievement-test scores, and selection into a competitive high school program the following spring. In a replication with 164 eighth graders, a behavioral delay-of-gratification task, a questionnaire on study habits, and a group-administered IQ test were added. Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework.

Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions.

Positive psychology has flourished in the last 5 years. The authors review recent developments in the field, including books, meetings, courses, and conferences. They also discuss the newly created classification of character strengths and virtues, a positive complement to the various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (e.

A balanced psychology and a full life.

Psychology since World War II has been largely devoted to repairing weakness and understanding suffering. Towards that end, we have made considerable gains. We have a classification of mental illness that allows international collaboration, and through this collaboration we have developed effective psychotherapeutic or pharmacological treatments for 14 major mental disorders.