1-079 - Points of entry: Building social/emotional strengths through targeting students, teachers, and parents

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Recent work suggests that social/emotional strengths like prosocial purpose, gratitude, grit, empathy, and strong connections with others are important in helping young people do well in school and live happy and fulfilling lives (e.g. Cohen et al., 2009; Cohen & Sherman, 2014; Dweck, 2008; Duckworth et al., 2007). However, there is still much to understand about how we can build these strengths. These papers illuminate four different, promising avenues through which we can target the development of social/emotional skills in children, adolescents, and the adults who play important roles in their lives.

The first speaker describes an in-school intervention that targets the ways ninth graders narrate important successes and failures in their lives and outlines its positive effects on students’ levels of grit and positive school engagement.
The second speaker describes work that shows the promise of using the photographic capabilities of Smartphones to increase gratitude and joy and decrease depression in college students. The third speaker targets teachers’ beliefs about school “troublemakers,” and finds that encouraging an empathic rather than punitive mindset about suspended students improves student-teacher relationships and reduces school suspensions over the course of the year. Finally, the fourth speaker describes work outside of school settings; he and his colleagues trace ways in which parents socialize their children to feel gratitude.

Sub Unit

• Moral Development

Chair

• Brady Katherine Jones, Northwestern University

Individual Presentations

• Social/emotional and school effects of a narrative intervention targeting adolescents’ prosocial purpose, gratitude, and grit - Presenting Author: Brady Katherine Jones, Northwestern University; Mesmin Destin, Northwestern University

• Picture this: Taking photographs to train attention toward joy and gratitude - Presenting Author: Laura McKee, Georgia State University; Sara Algoe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Alyssa Faro, Clark University; Jessica O'Leary, Clark University

• Targeting teachers' mindsets to promote empathy and respect improves student/teacher relationships and disciplinary outcomes - Presenting Author: Jason Okonofua, University of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Eberhardt, Stanford University; David Paunesku, Stanford University; Gregory Walton, Stanford University

• Grateful parents raising grateful children: Niche selection and the socialization of child gratitude - Presenting Author: William Andrew Rothenberg, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Andrea Hussong, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Hillary Langley, Sam Houston State University, Department of Psychology