This book presents Responsible Adult Culture (RAC), a truly comprehensive program for helping offenders to think and act responsibly. It provides the tools of the program with great clarity. In addition to exploring the needs of all offenders, the book addresses the special needs of both female and dual-diagnosis offenders. Responsible thinking means habitually seeing others and situations accurately, rather than in self-serving and egocentrically distorted ways. Because self-centered thin...

The New York Times –bestselling author and social philosopher explores the function of ethics and morality in the human psyche: "A fascinating volume . . . magnificent in its implications" ( Saturday Review ).Are we primarily determined by nature or nurture? What are the best ways that people can live productively? In Man for Himself, renowned social philosopher Erich Fr...

This briefs summarizes the research on positive well-being in children, with a particular focus on their happiness. It starts with a discussion of the constructs of positive psychology (i.e., well-being, happiness and life satisfaction), and then outlines the research that shows the importance of studying well-being. Next, it explores how researchers measure happiness and what these measures tell us about whether children are happy and how their happiness differs from adults. Following thi...

The second volume in the collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi covers about thirty years of Csikszentmihalyi‘s work on three main and interconnected areas of study: attention, flow and positive psychology. Describing attention as psychic energy and in the footsteps of William James, Csikszentmihalyi explores the allocation of attention, the when and where and the amount of attention humans pay to tasks and the role of attention in creating ‘experiences’, or ordered patterns of informa...

This volume integrates and makes sense of the growing body of theoretical and empirical research conducted on purpose across the lifespan. It opens with a comprehensive yet detailed discussion of the definitions of purpose most commonly used in studies on the topic. In addition to defining the construct, the author also discusses its philosophical roots and distinguishes it from related concepts, including meaning, goals, and ultimate concerns. This volume discusses the disparate perspecti...

Early in this century, most empirically oriented psychologists believed that all motivation was based in the physiology of a set of non-nervous system tissue needs. The theories of that era reflected this belief and used it in an attempt to explain an increasing number of phenomena. It was not until the 1950s that it became irrefutably clear that much of human motivation is based not in these drives, but rather in a set of innate psychological needs. Their physiological basis is less under...

This first volume of the Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi represents his work on Art and Creativity. Starting with his seminal 1964 study on creativity up to his 2010 publication in Newsweek, the volume spans over four decades of research and writing and clearly shows Csikszentmihalyi’s own development as an academic, psychologist, researcher and person. Unconventional and unorthodox in his approach, Csikszentmihalyi chose the topic of creativity as a field of study beli...

Positivism needs further scrutiny. In recent years, there has been little consensus about the nature of positivism or about the precise forms its influence has taken on psychological theory. One symptom of this lack of clarity has been that ostensibly anti-positivist psychological theorizing is frequently found reproducing one or more distinctively positivist assumptions. The contributors to this volume believe that, while virtually every theoretically engaged psychologist today openly rej...

This volume presents the reader with a stimulating tapestry of essays exploring the nature of personal autonomy, self-determination, and agency, and their role in human optimal functioning at multiple levels of analysis from personal to societal and cross-cultural. The starting point for these explorations is self-determination theory, an integrated theory of human motivation and healthy development which has been under development for more than three decades (Deci & Ryan, 2000). As the co...

What does Western science know about the relationship between individual well-being and cultural trends? What can learn from other cultural traditions? What do the recent advancements in positive psychology teach us on this issue, particularly the eudaimonic framework, which emphasizes the connections between personal well-being and social welfare?People grow and live in cultures that deeply influence their values, aspirations and behaviors. However, individuals in their turn play ...

This book discusses child well-being, with children and adolescents as key informants, from a Latin American perspective. It explores theoretical and empirical issues related to well-being and associated aspects, in order to understand the well-being of this population. Topics analyzed in this volume address for instance environment and community, rights, leisure time, technologies, interpersonal relationships and spirituality and their implications for changes in the well-being in childre...