Research Review

[019 Research Review | SCCT Series: 1] Career decisions can be impacted by self-esteem, future time perspective, positive affect and social support. In recent study by Park, Kim, Kwon & Lee (2018) exploring career decision-making of 128 university students revealed the role positive affect (positive emotions & expressions) and self-esteem have on improving an individual’s career decision belief in self (self-efficacy) and reducing career choice anxiety. A lack of self-esteem or heightened career choice anxiety can prevent someone in their pursuit of a desired career. This study sheds light on the value of daily self-reflection on improving one’s sense of self and future aspirations.

[018 Research Review | STRENGTH Series: 1] In the late 1990s, psychological research practitioners made a formal rallying cry to the American Psychological Association to push positive psychology research into the frontier of human strengths. Psychological research, as it developed over the 19th and early 20th centuries, focused on psychotic behaviors – their causes and how to fix them. As the authors of this paper point out, a focus on how to repair damaged psyches is critically important to society but it does not help us understand how psychologically healthy people can reach their highest potential.

[017 Research Review | LEARNING STYLES Series: 1] In recent decades, the idea of learning styles has spread broadly in the educational field. Its supporters make the argument that human beings learn in distinctly different ways from one another and people will therefore learn most effectively via instruction methods tailored to the way they learn best. It’s an incredibly useful idea, but its critics bring up a variety of valid points.

[016 Research Review | FLOW series: 3] In 1989, psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura assessed how intrinsic motivation might be related to flow in three groups of teenagers. After Larson and Csikszentmihalyi pioneered the ESM method in the early 1980s (see Chapters 2 and 3 here), researchers interested in flow could evaluate flow across broader categories of people in society like working professionals, adolescents, and mothers, for example. A lot of ESM flow researchers honed in on school, because school is a structured system for supporting students to develop academic skills in the face of scholarly challenges. 

[015 Research Review | FLOW Series: 2] In the 1980s, the Experience-Sampling Method (ESM) revolutionized the psychological study of human experience during daily life. It was made possible by the pager. Yes, the pager, or beeper, the ancestor of the two-way and cell phone. The thing that businesspeople and doctors wore on their hips during the 80s and 90s.