The assessment of psychosocial strengths in children and adolescents has predominately focused on the measurement of single traits and constructs, such as grit (Christopoulou, Lakioti, Pezirkianidis, Karakasidou, & Stalikas, 2018), optimism (Oberle, Guhn, Gadermann, Thomson, & Schonert-Reichl, 2018), hope (Pedrotti, 2018), and gratitude…

Background: Many school-based abstinence-only sex education curricula state that sexual activity outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological effects. Recent advances in neuroscience have expanded our understanding of the neural underpinnings of romantic love, marriage, sexual desire, and sexual behavior and improved our…

In this brief essay, I comment on the constellation of papers published in the current issue. I argue that it represents the new beginning of the new era for the journal, driven by several considerations. Among these, three are key. First, the collection of articles in this issue is explicitly concerned with the multivariate and multidisciplinary…

This study aimed to examine the effects of a sexual education program (SEP) focused on sexual media literacy (SML) for school nurses. A quasi-experimental, pre-/posttest design was used to examine SML knowledge, awareness, reinterpretation skill, and self-efficacy. A total of 66 school nurses participated. The experimental group (n = 35)…

Background: Different studies reveal an association between parent involvement, metacognition, and academic achievement; however, the majority analyse the developmental process of acquisition in experimental or quasi-experimental designs with students enrolled in child education. Adolescence is an important stage in personal and academic…

To provide further insight into stress generation patterns in boys and girls around puberty, this study investigated longitudinal reciprocal relations between depressive symptoms, dysfunctional attitudes, and stress generation, the process by which individuals contribute to the occurrence of stress in interpersonal contexts (e.g., problematic…

This study builds on previous research and policy that view teen sports as an educational tool and public health asset. The results highlighted that school-based athletics continued to be the most popular activity provided by high schools in the U.S. and was the only school-based extracurricular activity that showed an increase in participation…

New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional…

Life span developmental psychology proposes that the ability to create a coherent life narrative does not develop until early adolescence. Using a novel methodology, 10-, 12-, and 14-year-old participants were asked to tell their life stories aloud to a researcher. Later, participants separated their transcribed narratives into self-identified…

This article embeds the study of character development within the two-decades-long research program framed by the Lerner and Lerner model of positive youth development. Character development involves attaining the feelings, thoughts, and skills needed to act coherently across time and place to serve self and others in mutually beneficial, positive…

Vygotsky measured his 'zone of proximal development' in years. To do this, he needed a scheme of age periods, and a set of tasks that could diagnose the next age period without defining it. In this paper, we compare the age periods in his late lectures with Halliday's categories of logico-semantic expansion as used by three adolescent…

Since the emergence of middle schools as distinct educational settings in the 1960s, proponents of the model have advocated for structures and approaches that best meet the particular developmental needs of young adolescents. Middle school researchers have developed frameworks of best practices for schools that have been widely, if not uniformly,…

Interpersonal relationships during adolescence can be powerful avenues for personal development. As school is a universal context for youth, positive teacher-student relationships (TSRs) are one potential source for such developmentally promotive relationships. Unfortunately, research has shown a decline in the quality of teacher-student…

Puberty is often implicated in the onset or exacerbation of psychopathology during adolescence, and pubertal timing and tempo have emerged as important predictors of wellbeing. In the psychosocial literature there is a tendency to view individual differences in the nature (timing and tempo) of pubertal development as either determined by stress…

Growing up in a high family risk (HFR) environment is accompanied by difficulties in executive functions (EFs) and interpersonal skills (IS) that may persist into adulthood. Because preadolescence is a critical period, this study will assess a multicomponent mediational intervention program, to determine the possibility of improving these skills.…