The aim of many educators is to help youth reach their maximum potential. The Clifton Youth StrengthsExplorer gives teachers a tool to help identify the talents of their students, as well as actionable suggestions for utilizing those talents. Such information can help teachers to individualize the ways in which they respond to youths, and the…

The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) is a functional assessment used in approximately 27 states to evaluate youth service outcomes. The CANS purports to measure both the youth's risk and protective factors, but its validity is largely un-researched. This study compares ratings of 304 delinquent youth on the CANS and ratings on a…

A social worker and a psychologist, working with troubled youth in a day treatment setting, describe unique ways to use the concepts of Positive Peer Culture (PPC) to facilitate groups from the elementary to high school levels. The authors have adapted the well-known PPC concepts and incorporated them into their strength-based program, SPLASH, to…

What differentiates nonviolent individuals from violent individuals? This paper addresses the question by linking current psychological literature on human values with literature on nonviolence. Recent contributions to values theory have begun to establish a universal structure of human values. The theoretical case is made that nonviolent…

Compulsivity and obsessiveness are vaguely defined terms which include a broad range of behaviors and cognitions that have been elusive to quantify. To introduce the 22-item Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (OCS) and to perform preliminary validation studies, 114 (46 male, 68 female) college students and 57 counseling clients completed the OCS on two…

Both external locus of control (i.e., a generalized expectancy that reinforcement is controlled by luck or fate instead of oneself) and internal locus of attribution (i.e., beliefs that success or failure result from an individual's actions rather than external causes) have been related to depression. To examine the relationship of attributions…

Most child abuse has a violent quality. A review of the research on child abusers reveals some interesting psychosocial and historical characteristics. Research has shown violence to be more likely in less stable populations, in persons with poor driving records and histories of severe accidents, and in those who are undereducated and unsuccessful…

Many social policies rely on assessments of violence potential in their implementation. Decisions concerning such civil matters as involuntary institutionalization and level of institutional custody, and criminal matters such as type or length of sentence and the granting of bail often rely on estimates of the potential that an individual will be…

Many employers have asserted that women are not good candidates for administrative positions because they could not stand up to the pressures and stress associated with administrative responsibilities. To test the validity of this assertion, a comparision was made of the occupational stress profiles of male and female educational administrators in…

Examined communication concerning wartime experiences in survivor families through interviews and testing of Jewish children of survivors (N=64). Results indicated that willingness to talk about experiences and frequency of communication were related to negative factors among offspring for the mother and positive factors among offspring for the…

Presents a profile of parents who abuse their children, addressing demographic characteristics, personality traits, psychological patterns, and emotional responses. Implications for school counselors are given. (BL)

Examines the degree of compatibility between the personalities of 22 self-reported child abusers and the target child singled out for abuse in the family. Results showed abusing parents tended to be rigid while their children were more often coded as artistic. Results confirmed Holland's theory of personality. (JAC)

Causal attributions of shy students (N=36) were compared with those of a comparison group of students (N=36) in ten situations. Significant differences between the two groups emerged when explaining outcomes of situations considered to be problematic for shy individuals. Causal attributions may reflect realistic and situation-specific…

Assessed anxiety scores of 70 male and female students (28 right-handers, 23 left-handers and 19 mixed-handers) for relationship to the handedness classification of each individual. Found females showed higher anxiety scores than males; left-handers and mixed-handers were more anxious than right-handers; and extremes of handedness were more…

Hypothesized that selected personality variables, could positively predict loneliness; and self-esteem and extraversion could negatively predict loneliness scores. Studied two groups of subjects: Iranian college students in American colleges and Iranian students in Iranian universities. Results confirmed the directions stated in the research…