Learning a foreign language incorporates cognitive, communicative, emotional, and social aspects. Some of these aspects have to do with the structure of the language being studied; some others deal with social and psychological issues that influence the environment where the learning process takes place. This reflection paper addresses various…

Robert McGrath (this issue) has proposed a useful way of bringing the field closer to a consensual definition of character education. We support much of his proposal. Like McGrath, we believe the goal of character education should be to increase the expression of qualities that benefit one's self and others. We also agree that character education…

This article presents comments on the original article by McNulty and Fincham ("American Psychologist," v67 n2 p101-110 Feb-Mar 2012). McNulty and Fincham provided a service to the field of positive psychology through reminding us that whether psychological traits and processes yield positive or negative outcomes is a function of the interpersonal…

This article discusses the concepts of happiness, emotional well-being and mental health in the light of recent work on children's spirituality, to argue that such a consideration can help to avoid simplistic and individualistic views of each. Distinguishing between happiness as short-term gratification and as longer-term flourishing, the latter…

The "care challenge" is shown to be both broader and more successful than Walker and Frimer's (this issue, pp. 53-68) critique allows. The main philosophical and psychological tenets of the care challenge foreshadowed the direction of twenty-first century moral psychology.

The article by Flatt and Hewitt (2006) highlights a number of important issues in the study of perfectionism and rightly urges caution against simplistic conceptualizations. Their view that the term "perfectionism" should be reserved for pathological forms of behavior is questionable, though understandable given the perspective from which they…

The author argues that the term "recovery" aptly describes the trajectory following the bereavement of most persons. While the term "resilience" has gained ascendancy in the thanatology literature and the term "recovery" has been dismissed as inappropriate to denote responses over time to being bereaved, the irony is that all dictionaries of the…

This author became intrigued by the idea that her generation, who had grown up reaping the benefits of second-wave feminism, might differ from previous generations in their attitudes toward women. What was unclear was how this period of progress might have combined with feminist backlash in affecting subsequent generations' responses to typical…

This paper argues that the new science of positive psychology is founded on a whole series of fallacious arguments; these involve circular reasoning, tautology, failure to clearly define or properly apply terms, the identification of causal relations where none exist, and unjustified generalisation. Instead of demonstrating that positive attitudes…

We are grateful to the commentators for providing many stimulating and valuable observations. The main point of our article was to call attention to the overestimation of individual differences correlations in a subset of neuroimaging papers. To structure our discussion of these comments, we list the main points from our paper, note where…

Many myths about adolescence have been refuted by research, but similar myths have grown up in recent years around emerging adulthood. This essay addresses three of those myths: the claim that they suffer from a normative "crisis"; the accusations that they are "selfish"; and their alleged reluctance to "grow up" and become adults. For each issue,…

People are often presumed to be vulnerable to a desirability bias, namely, a tendency to be overoptimistic about a future outcome as a result of their preferences or desires for that outcome. In this article, this form of wishful thinking is distinguished from the more general concepts of motivated reasoning and overoptimism, and the evidence for…

Provided is a commentary on articles written for a special section on temperament and childhood disorders. Temperament's contributions to the development of childhood disorders are considered both generally and specifically. Questions are raised about the use of terminology in the field, particularly the term difficult. Differentiation of outcomes…

A substantial proportion of children and adolescents come to suffer from psychological disorders. This article focuses on the temperament factors that are involved in the pathogenesis of child psychopathology. It is argued that besides the reactive temperament factor of emotionality/neuroticism, the regulative process of effortful control also…

Describes a type of educational administrator in terms of demographic, emotional, behavioral, and interpersonal characteristics, underscoring this individual's less than fully authentic concern for others. This administrative personality type is then related to psychological theories of narcissism, obsessive-compulsive personality, and aggression.…