A Psychology of Human Strengths: Fundamental Questions and Future Directions for a Positive Psychology

This volume sets out a research agenda for the scientific study of human strengths. Scholars in a variety of psychology fields have each directed their attention to positive psychology and focused their work through a lens of human strengths. The results of their findings are intended to provide a forward-looking forum for the discussion of the purpose, pitfalls, and future of the psychology of human strengths. The book contains intriguing and diverse commentaries on historical and contemporary research on human strengths. It should be of interest for those looking for new ways of thinking about such topics as intelligence, judgment, volition, social behaviour, close relationships, development, aging, and health as well as applications to psychotherapy, education, organizational psychology, gender, politics, creativity, and other realms of life.

Table of Contents:
A Psychology of Human Strengths: Some Central Issues of an Emerging Field, Lisa G. Aspinwall and Ursula M. Staudinger; Human Strength as the Orchestration of Wisdom and Selective Optimization with Compensation (SOC), Paul B. Baltes and Alexandra M. Freund; The Human's Greatest Strength - Other Humans, Ellen Berscheid; Constructive Cognition, Personal Goals, and the Social Embedding of Personality, Nancy Cantor; A Conception of Personality for a Psychology of Human Strengths - Personality as an Agentic, Self-Regulating System, Gian Vittorio Caprara and Daniel Cervone; Human Aging - Why Is Even Good News Taken as Bad?, Laura L. Carstensen and Susan T. Charles; Three Human Strengths, Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier; The Malleability of Sex Differences in Response to Changing Social Roles, Alice H. Eagly and Amanda B. Diekman; Toward a Positive Psychology - Social Developmental and Cultural Contributions, Nancy Eisenberg and Vivian Ota Wang; Light and Dark in the Psychology of Human Strengths - The Example of Psychogerontology, Roc o Fern ndez-Ballesteros; Intervention as a Major Tool of a Psychology of Human Strength - Examples from Organizational Change and Innovation, Dieter Frey, Eva Jonas, and Tobias Greitemeyer; Judgmental Heuristics: Human Strengths or Human Weaknesses?, Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman; Positive Affect as a Source of Human Strength, Alice Isen; The Parametric Unimodel of Human Judgment - A Fanfare to the Common Thinker, Arie W. Kruglanski, Hans-Peter Erb, Scott Spiegel, and Antonio Pierro; Turning Adversity to Advantage - On the Virtues of the Coactivation of Positive and Negative Emotions, Jeff T. Larsen, Scott H. Hemenover, Catherine J. Norris, and John T. Cacioppo; A Holistic Person Approach for Research on Positive Development, David Magnusson and Joseph L. Mahoney; Harnessing Willpower and Socio-emotional Intelligence to Enhance Human Agency and Potential, Walter Mischel and Rodolpho Mendoza-Denton; The Motivational Sources of Creativity as Viewed from the Paradigm of Positive Psychology, Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Ironies of the Human Condition: Well-being and Health on the Way to Mortality, Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer; Political Symbols and Collective Moral Action, David O. Sears; Positive Clinical Psychology, Martin E. P. Seligman and Christopher Peterson; Driven to Despair: Why We Need to Redefine the Concept and Measurement of Intelligence, Robert J. Sternberg; The Ecology of Human Strengths, Daniel Stokols.