With the limited success of social skills training on particularly disruptive behaviors, researchers have begun to develop a more holistic approach grounded in "temperament" research that focuses on supporting underlying traits as they emerge during development. Based on this approach, this column provides a theoretical basis and…

Delay discounting is the decline in the present value of a reward with delay to its receipt. Across a variety of species, populations, and reward types, value declines hyperbolically with delay. Value declines steeply with shorter delays, but more shallowly with longer delays. Quantitative modeling provides precise measures to characterize the…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is often conducted with ordinal data (e.g., items with 5-point responses) in the social and behavioral sciences. These ordinal variables are often treated as if they were continuous in practice. An alternative strategy is to assume that a normally distributed continuous variable underlies each ordinal variable.…

Resilience researchers are intrigued with the challenge of understanding how people overcome risk or adversity to succeed in life. The study of resilience emerged about 40 years ago when a group of scientists studying the origins of behaviour problems and mental illness were surprised to find that many children in "high risk" groups were…

Entrepreneurship is a major source of employment, economic growth, and innovation, promoting product and service quality, competition, and economic flexibility. It is also a mechanism by which many people enter the society's economic and social mainstream, aiding culture formation, population integration, and social mobility. This article aims to…

Personality, as a construct, has been largely ignored or misapplied in the clinical and/or cognitive-behavioral literature. This article discusses the history of the concept of personality in clinical psychology and in cognitive-behavioral approaches and provides the main rationale for this special series. The articles that comprise the series…

Provides a brief summarization of 12 articles focusing on how gender, gender role identity, and attitudes toward gender roles may affect the nature of relationships, and how relationships may affect an individual's gender (including behaviors, attitudes, and self-perceptions). Although the focus is mainly on heterosexual relationships, lesbian/gay…

In this overview of his research in personality theory, Cattell describes the play of people, situations, and, ideas enacted over 30 years in his University of Illinois laboratory. Establishing meaningful empirical measurement methods was the foundation for further research into many aspects of personality development. (BS)

Maintains that a loss-gain hypothesis (a negative impression gives way to a positive one) is a more powerful indicator and incentive for future friendship than an opposite sequence (positive to negative). Both of these, however, were eclipsed by a positive-positive interaction as a determinant of interpersonal attraction. (MJP)

Recounts an experiment where two groups of college students composed questions for a simulated quiz show and then answered each other's questions. They then answered questions comparing their performance with other groups. Proposes a social norm rather than attribution error explanation for the fact that groups consistently will underestimate…