Through her theoretical and empirical work, Mary Rothbart has had a profound impact on the scientific understanding of infant and child temperament. This special issue honors her contributions through the presentations of original, contemporary studies relevant to three primary themes in Rothbart's conceptual approach: the expansive scope and…

This study identifies grief management strategies that bereaved adults evaluate as more and less helpful, assesses whether the person centeredness of these strategies explains their helpfulness, and determines whether strategy helpfulness varies as a function of demographic, personality, and situational factors. Participants (105 bereaved young…

The study aims to determine critical thinking tendencies among teacher candidates. 720 students from primary school teaching department (Primary School Teaching Programme, Science Teaching Programme and Pre-School Teaching Programme) form the sample of the study. When the gender and age distributions were investigated, 253 candidates are males and…

The authors report a meta-analysis of individual differences in detecting deception, confining attention to occasions when people judge strangers' veracity in real-time with no special aids. The authors have developed a statistical technique to correct nominal individual differences for differences introduced by random measurement error. Although…

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) refers to the theoretical prediction that equally able students will have lower academic self-concepts in higher-achieving or selective schools or programs than in lower-achieving or less selective schools or programs, largely due to social comparison based on local norms. While negative consequences of…

Hemispheric asymmetry implies the existence of developmental influences that affect one hemisphere more than the other. However, those influences are poorly understood. One simple view is that asymmetry may exist because of a relationship between a mental process' degree of lateralization and how well it functions. Data scaling issues have largely…

The author takes the position that the foundational value of the counseling profession is an ethic of appreciation for human differences. The professional tool that is used to actualize this value is language. In this regard, the philosophical distinction between copying and coping conceptualizations of language is overviewed. The author argues…

Integrative hierarchical models have sought to account for the extensive comorbidity between various internalizing disorders in terms of broad individual difference factors these disorders share. However, such models have been developed largely on the basis of self-report and diagnostic symptom data. Toward the goal of linking such models to…

Although an important role has been ascribed to working-memory capacity in reading comprehension, little consensus exists on its conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement except for its recognition as a limited-capacity processing and storage system. One specific problem in the measurement of working memory comes from researchers' use…

We use prospective couple-level data from the Changing Lives of Older Couples to assess the extent to which spouses concur in their assessments of marital quality (N = 844) and whether discrepancies in spouses' marital assessments affect the bereaved spouse's psychological adjustment 6 months after loss (n = 105). Spouses' assessments of marital…

The aim of the present study was to simultaneously examine the effect of factors related to school, leisure, family and the individual on adolescent smoking. These determining factors occupy the micro- and mesosystems of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory. Data were collected using questionnaires from a nationally representative sample of…

Teachers do not want to have students simply marking time by completing tasks from which there is no new learning for them. Similarly, teachers do not want students struggling with tasks that are demoralisingly difficult. In one primary mathematics classroom, however, a teacher can expect to have a wide range in the levels of understanding of the…

This study examined the prediction of different forms of adult aggression in 2 countries from child and adolescent aggression. It was based on 2 longitudinal projects: the Jyvaskyla Longitudinal Study of Personality and Social Development (JYLS; N = 196 boys and 173 girls) conducted in Finland and the Columbia County Longitudinal Study (CCLS; N =…

Toward greater specificity in the prediction of externalizing problems in the context of interparental conflict, interactions between children's parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system (PNS and SNS) activity were examined as moderators. PNS activity was indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and RSA reactivity (RSA-R) to lab…

This study examined the role of goal orientation dimensions in understanding differences in time spent in an online, occupational training program. In predicting time to train, there was a significant interaction between mastery and performance-avoid goal orientations ([beta] = -0.32), highlighting the value of considering goal orientation…