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Introduction
Juliette Ratchford is an assistant research professor in the Department of Psychology at Wake Forest University. Her main research interests lie in the intersection of personality, social, and positive psychology. She is specifically interested in developing contextually-valid, personality-based measures of virtue. Most of her work involves quantitative methodology.
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July 2018 - August 2022
August 2022 - May 2023
Publications
Publications (36)
The virtue of thrift, defined as the wise use and distribution of resources, has yet to receive much empirical study, despite the popularization of virtue research more broadly within positive psychology. With the recent rise in perceived resource scarcity (North and Fiske in J Soc Issues 72:122–145, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12159), thrif...
This study (N = 484 participants recruited through CloudResearch at a single measurement occasion) was the first to use a person-centered approach on the Five Factor Model facets and to discover how profile membership related to various well-being outcomes (i.e., life satisfaction, psychological richness, meaning, goal orientation, and beyond-the-s...
The circumplex of values (Schwartz et al., 2001) is a continuum of motivation, wherein values that are closer together in the circle are similar, and distal values are dissimilar. The circumplex of values suggests that values are ordered by importance, indicating the need to consider ranking in relation to values. However, most analyses conducted o...
In conceptualizing virtues as fully distinct constructs and vices as the absence of virtues, positive psychology is unable to provide a coherent account that explains tensions between virtues. This article puts forward a simple, holistic model that emphasizes the counterbalancing nature of virtues and conceptualizes vices as both deficiencies and e...
In this paper, we provide a contextualized assessment of virtue through validation of a goals-based approach to measuring patience, the Goals-Based Virtue-Patience Scale (GBV-P). To assess virtue in a way congruent with its definition requires consideration of situational and contextual factors; however, most extant measures of virtue instead asses...
Objective: Research shows welcoming accountability and a related construct, personal responsibility, are relevant for goal pursuit, but whether they contribute to future satisfaction with goal pursuit progress remains unstudied. Method: This longitudinal investigation examined the pursuit of self-identified goals in 893 students attending 14 US uni...
Objective: Research shows welcoming accountability and a related construct, personal responsibility, are relevant for goal pursuit, but whether they contribute to future satisfaction with goal pursuit progress remains unstudied. Method: This longitudinal investigation examined the pursuit of self-identified goals in 893 students attending 14 US uni...
Whole Trait Theory (and other dynamic theories of personality) can illuminate the process by which motivational states become traits. Mental computational processes constitute part of the explanatory mechanisms that drive trait manifestations. Empirical work on Whole Trait Theory may inform future research directions on mental computational process...
Current virtue theories emphasize the role of self-transcendent morality in virtue development, but there is limited empirical work exploring this. A three-week meditation-based intervention (N = 877) experimentally manipulated self-transcending (vs. instrumental) motives in the development of patience, generosity, social responsibility, gratitude,...
Religion can provide people with a sense of worthiness. The present study takes a person-centered approach to identify profiles of contingent self-worth within a Christian population and describe how profiles associate with well-being and religious outcomes. In two studies (N = 941), latent profile analysis is used to identify hidden subtypes of pe...
Multicultural scholars suggest that effective Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training must raise awareness of prejudice and racism while also including strategies for changing behavior by developing certain approach goals (e.g. the goal of becoming a more courageous and patient person). This study examines how virtue interventions that cult...
Depression and anxiety symptoms have risen in the last decade, especially among college students. Virtues are potentially strong predictive factors of mental health symptoms, but a minimal amount of research has explored which virtues are the strongest predictors. We examined the relative predictive strength of gratitude, forgiveness, patience, int...
Historically, researchers have conceptualized self-esteem as global self-evaluation; recently, others have suggested that people are selective about what affects their self-worth. Two studies (N = 1,032) used a person-centered approach to examine how six domains of self-worth contingency associate with well-being, virtue, and value outcomes. Latent...
What does it mean to be a good thinker? Which virtues work together in someone who possesses good intellectual character? Although recent research on virtues has highlighted the benefits of individual intellectual virtues, being an excellent thinker is likely a function of possessing multiple intellectual virtues. Specifically, a good thinker would...
We compare the definition of virtue in philosophy with the definition and operationalization of virtue in psychology. We articulate characteristics that virtue is presented as possessing in the perennial western philosophical tradition. Virtues are typically understood as (a) dispositional (b) deep-seated (c) habits (d) that contribute to flourishi...
The present study uses a person-centered approach to examine personality profiles of religious variables and the dark triad traits in relation to intellectual humility, prosociality, and mental health cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Undergraduates at a religious university completed assessments across two timepoints (Time 1: N = 1,006; Time 2...
Extant literature often assumes that gratitude is intrinsically positive therefore ought to be maximized. Virtue theory and social alignment theory, however, suggest gratitude is adaptive only in specific relational contexts. Drawing from find-remind-bind theory’s notion that gratitude functions to promote interactions with supportive partners in p...
Sacred meaning is regularly attributed to body movements in a variety of religious and spiritual settings, but studies have yet to disentangle the effects of the sacred meaning attributed to body movements from the effects of body movements themselves. Participants (n = 422) were randomly assigned to draw six lines that were fluid or nonfluid (as a...
Much of the recent work on prejudice emphasizes individual differences, which focuses on the strength of relations between variables on specific instances of prejudice such as racial–ethnic or sexual prejudices. However, the relations between religiosity and prejudice variables are inconsistent and sometimes even paradoxical (Allport, 1954). In thr...
Despite renewed interest in the psychological study of character strengths, positive psychology remains marked by criticisms surrounding the differentiation of character strengths from other personality and developmental constructs. To highlight pathways for increased precision in character theory and empirical work, the study examined bidirectiona...
This study aimed to assess the congruencies and discrepancies between mindset domains in relation to well-being and sought to demonstrate that mindset falls into the characteristic adaptation level of personality. Data (N = 618, Mage = 16.07, SDage = 0.99) from Wave 1 of a longitudinal study on primarily ethnic-minority adolescents were used in res...
For Christian colleges and universities, students’ spiritual formation and character development are important outcomes. However, unlike academic outcomes of retention and graduation, systematic efforts to measure outcomes of faith and character are far from ubiquitous. The purpose of this article is to report the efforts of Baylor University to ad...
Unprecedented levels of access to adolescents' time and attention provide opportunities to convert traditional character and socioemotional competencies interventions into behavioral intervention technologies. However, these new tools must be evaluated rather than assuming previously validated activities will be efficacious when converted to a mobi...
Situational variation is consistently leveled as a criticism of character research and theory. Across adolescence, young people’s realization that they may display certain character strengths in some relational contexts (e.g., with peers) but not in others (e.g., with parents) may reflect a normative, underlying process of differentiation. Using a...
Moral education requires interdisciplinary engagement across philosophy, psychology, and education. Positive psychologists regularly acknowledge the breadth and depth of wisdom regarding the cultivation of virtues present in philosophical and religious texts and consult such writings when creating constructs, but they are less prone to integrate sc...
Although self-reports suggest that religious individuals consider themselves universally prosocial, behavioral measures suggest a more limited prosociality and priming studies suggest a small causal relationship. Recent research has uncovered new moderators, with religiousness being more strongly related to prosociality under self-image threat, and...
Endurance activities provide a key context for positive development. Using data from a longitudinal study of 398 adolescents and emerging adults participating in a charity marathon event, this study examined the multidimensionality of self-control, documented longitudinal change in inhibitory and initiatory self-control across program participation...
Few studies test whether religious affiliation affects ethnic self-stigma in minority populations, and no studies test whether ethnic self-stigma mediates the relation between religious affiliation and economic behaviors or outcomes. Many Quichua living in Quito, Ecuador identify with Pentecostalism, which anecdotally is reported to transform ident...
Current definitions of joy are afflicted by jingle-jangle fallacies. Definitions fail to distinguish joy from other positive emotions (e.g. happiness), explanatory styles (e.g. optimism), and traits (e.g. positive emotionality facet of extraversion), or they are low in scientific utility because they require normative standards by which to judge if...
Previous research on virtue development through sports participation has produced mixed findings; some studies find participation increases symptoms of mental illness and antisocial behaviors (Fauth, Roth, & Brooks-Gunn, 2007; Kavussanu, Boardley, Sagar, & Ring, 2013), whereas other studies find that participation increases mental health and prosoc...
Adolescents are usually discouraged from using profanity. Attempts are made by parents, teachers, and advisory warnings in entertainment to keep adolescents from being exposed to profanity (Kaye & Sapolsky, 2004). These preventative measures do not keep adolescents from engaging in profane language among their peers, even though users of profanity...
Adolescence is one of the most common periods during which people report religious transformations (Regnerus & Uecker, 2006), but few studies have examined what variables might precipitate a transformation during this time. Based on early writings of James (1902) and Starbuck (1911), we tested the hypotheses that adolescents are more likely to expe...
