Lea E. Waters

University of Melbourne | MSD · Centre for the Study of Higher Education

The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) technologies, such as ChatGPT-4 and Bard, has the potential to significantly change wellbeing education. This Chapter explores the applications of generative AI technologies in wellbeing education, with a focus on how chatbots and similar can be used to...

The peer-review system, commonly considered critical for research integrity and rigour, has been criticised for being slow, exclusionary and exploitive. Concerns include the high profits of academic publishers as well as the growing number of insecurely employed academic staff who report high levels of stress and burnout. The consequence has been a...

Introduction Parenting a sexual minority child can pose both challenges and opportunities for growth. This study explored the effects of a strength-based parenting (SBP) intervention in helping parents of sexual minority children to develop (1) psychological growth and (2) a stronger parent-child bond. Method Six parents participated in the interv...

This paper describes the development of the Flourishing Classroom System Observation Framework and Rubric, which provides a framework and practical approach to defining and describing multiple interconnected observable characteristics of a classroom system that individually and together can be targeted to cultivate collective flourishing within sch...

This qualitative study focused upon ways teachers make meaning when working with students who are affected by trauma. An 11-month longitudinal design was used to explore teachers’ perspectives (N = 18 teachers) as they reflected upon the impacts of trauma within their classrooms and as they learned about trauma-informed practice strategies. Data fr...

The present study aimed to examine whether the level of strength-based parenting a student receives during remote learning affects their levels of academic motivation once returning to school. Additionally, the study sought to explore whether school belonging mediated the association between strength-based parenting and academic motivation and whet...

The benefits of gratitude are universally recognized in psychology and other disciplines. However, the capacity for trait gratitude to bring advantages to employees and organizations is an under-explored area despite the fact that trait gratitude could offer considerable benefits to organizational performance and success through its potential impac...

For more than a decade, the field of positive education has amassed growing evidence that school-based well-being interventions support and boost the mental health of students. Outcomes such as hope, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, pro-social behavior, school engagement and academic grades have all been shown to significantly increase fol...

To help build early childhood mental health, an understanding of how young children comprehend and communicate about wellbeing (i.e., wellbeing literacy) is required; yet early childhood remains an understudied age group in positive psychology research. Grounded in the two fields of early childhood and positive psychology, this inductive qualitativ...

Introduction Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) has changed the way families live, interact, and connect with others, resulting in higher levels of stress for many teenagers who struggle with the ongoing uncertainty and disrupted school and family life. The current study examined the psychosocial factors that influence the capacity of adolescents...

This large-scale quantitative review used publication data to track the presence of positive education terms over a 100+ year period across 35 psychology journals and education journals utilizing two analytical methods. First, computer-generated linguistic word count analysis identified that positive education terms have shown small but steady grow...

Over the past decade, research has consistently found that positive education interventions have a beneficial effect on mental health outcomes for students, such as improvements in life satisfaction and reduction of anxiety. While it is encouraging to see these changes in student mental health, the research has not yet adequately explored whether p...

Positive psychology approaches have been shown to play a vital role in protecting mental health in times of challenge and are, therefore, important to include when studying the psychological outcomes of COVID-19. While existing research has focused on individual psychological health, this paper focuses on collective wellbeing and collective posttra...

The move to remote learning during COVID-19 has impacted billions of students. While research shows that school closure, and the pandemic more generally, has led to student distress, the possibility that these disruptions can also prompt growth in is a worthwhile question to investigate. The current study examined stress-related growth (SRG) in a s...

For the last 15 years, teacher wellbeing has been a priority area of exploration within education and positive psychology literatures. However, increasing teacher wellbeing for those who educate students impacted by trauma has yet to be comprehensively explored despite repeated exposure of teachers to child trauma and their experiences of associate...

For LGBTQ + individuals, coming out can be an experience of marked adversity. Indeed, research has shown that the experience can trigger psychological ill-health (e.g. depression and anxiety) as well as posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) such as sleep disturbance, somatic symptoms and cognitive distress. While studies have investigated the pain a...

As the COVID-19 global health disaster continues to unfold across the world, calls have been made to address the associated mental illness public crisis. The current paper seeks to broaden these calls by considering the role that positive psychology factors can play in buffering against mental illness, bolstering mental health during COVID-19 and b...

The move to remote learning triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic impacted billions of students globally in 2020. While research shows that school closure, and the pandemic more generally, has led to student distress, the possibility that these disruptions can also prompt growth in young people is a worthwhile question to investigate. The current stud...

The development of academic fields is often described through the metaphor of ‘waves.’ Following the instantiation of positive psychology (the first wave), scholarship emerged looking critically at the notions of positive and negative, becoming known as its second wave. More recently, we discern an equally significant shift, namely scholarship that...

A randomized wait-list control study examined the effects of two positive psychology interventions (PPIs) on 300 families across six countries. A systems approach was used to design the PPIs and to interpret the impact of these upon family happiness. A system is an interconnected set of elements (e.g., the people, practices, rituals, and resources...

This paper reviews school-based (n = 212) and clinically-based (n = 68) positive psychological interventions (PPIs) for children and adolescents. A new 3 × 3 classification of PPIs was developed based on the processes and content of the PPI and the outcomes measured. This classification involves 9 different types of interventions depending on wheth...

Although positive education has made significant progress towards fostering student wellbeing at the individual level through the application of positive psychology interventions, adopting a systems-informed perspective will support the field to also approach wellbeing at the classroom and collective levels. Arguably, this approach will promote a m...

This study is situated in the paradigms of positive organizational scholarship (POS) and positive organizational behaviour (POB). It draws upon the theoretical mechanisms of social learning and emotional contagion to suggest that psychological capital may spread through work teams to impact team outcomes such as performance, innovation, and organiz...

The focus of this study was on adolescent mental health. More specifically, the relationship between strength-based parenting (SBP) and subjective wellbeing (SWB) during adolescence was examined at three time points over 14 months (N = 202, Mage = 12.97, SDage = 0.91, 48% female). SBP was positively related to life satisfaction and positive affect...

This study explored how primary and secondary school teachers changed their practice pedagogy as they underwent training in trauma-informed positive education (Brunzell et al., Contemp School Psychol 20:63–83, 2016b. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40688-015-0070-x). TIPE integrates teaching strategies from two practice paradigms: trauma-informed educatio...

This paper presents a data-driven, meta-framework to support evidence-based decisions for researchers and practitioners when designing, investigating and implementing positive education interventions: the SEARCH framework. SEARCH was developed through a two-stage process. Stage one comprised a large-scale bibliometric review and thematic grouping o...

Strength-based parenting (SBP) is a style of parenting characterized by knowledge and encouragement of a child’s unique personality, abilities, talents, and skills (i.e., strengths). Recent studies have demonstrated a unique contribution of SBP, above other parenting styles, in predicting a range of wellbeing indicators in adolescents. Given that w...

Belonging is an essential aspect of psychological functioning. Schools offer unique opportunities to improve belonging for school-aged children. Research on school belonging, however, has been fragmented and diluted by inconsistency in the use of terminology. To resolve some of these inconsistencies, the current study uses meta-analysis of individu...

Purpose: The vision or mission statement of a school outlines the school’s purpose and defines the context, goals, and aspirations that govern the institution. Using vision and mission statements, the present descriptive research study investigated trends in Australian secondary schools’ priorities. Research Methods: A stratified sample of secondar...

Recent research suggests that strength-based parenting—the tendency for parents to see and encourage children to use their strengths—relates to lower stress and higher life satisfaction in adolescents. The current study tests whether strength-based parenting, in conjunction with a teenager’s strengths use, influences the teenager’s subjective wellb...

This study contributed new findings to the construct of meaningful work (MW) and negative impacts on MW. In other professional samples, finding meaning in work has been shown to be an effective buffer when facing workplace adversity. However, prior investigation has neither identified nor explored the specific sources and mechanisms of meaningful w...

Preliminary studies of strength-based parenting (SBP), a style of parenting that seeks to build strengths knowledge and strengths use in one’s child, have reported benefits such as higher life satisfaction, subjective wellbeing, and positive emotions together with lower stress in children and teens. Two proximal mediators conveying these effects ha...

In his 1998 Presidential address to the American Psychological Association, launching the field of positive psychology, Professor Martin Seligman stated, “Ideally, psychology should be able to help document what kind of families’ result in the healthiest children” (Seligman M, Am Psychol 54:559–562, 1999, p. 560). The theme of positive families was...

School vision and mission statements are an explicit indication of a school's priorities. Research has found academic motivation, mental health promotion, and school belonging to be the most frequently cited themes in these statements. The present study sought to examine whether these themes relate to student academic achievement, as indicated by N...

Positive education (PosEd) combines the concepts and scholarship of positive psychology (PP) with best practice guidelines from education to promote student flourishing within educational settings. In this chapter, we first review the conceptual approaches to well-being upon which much of PosEd in Australia is based. Second, based on our experience...

The literature on school belonging is not well advanced in Australia and is complicated by a disparity in terminology (e.g., school belonging has been referred to as school connectedness, school bonding, affiliation with school, school community). Nevertheless, there is a common understanding that school belonging is vital and necessary for the soc...

[This corrects the article on p. 878 in vol. 7, PMID: 27378978.].

This paper argues that psychological and social functioning is fundamentally complex, and that this complexity is critical to understanding how lasting positive changes can be achieved. Principles from complex systems theory are integrated into an empirical positive psychological framework to propose a domain-based systems model of positive change...

This intervention study examines the iterative reprocessing of explicit and implicit attitudes as the process underlying associations between positive employee attitudes (PsyCap), perception of positive organization culture (organizational virtuousness, OV), and work happiness. Using a quasi-experimental design, a group of school staff (N = 69) com...

Although strength-based interventions have been employed with general and targeted adult samples, to date, no published research has examined the effect of strength-based interventions for parents. Given that parenting can trigger both ill-being and wellbeing outcomes, more research is needed to examine how to help parents thrive and to meet Seligm...

he 15th Australian Psychological Society Psychology of Relationships Interest Group (APS-PORIG) National Conference

Fostering School Belonging in Secondary School Settings poster for the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference 2016, Melbourne.

Growing evidence indicates that gratefulness and gratitude are important for well-being and happiness. Yet, research to date has been hindered by a lack of conceptual clarity into the nature of these constructs. The present paper reviews existing literature and argues for a distinction between gratefulness and gratitude. While both gratefulness and...

: This conceptual paper presents the Inside-Out-Outside-In (IO-OI) model, a dual process positive systems science approach to developing work happiness. The model suggests that work happiness of employees is influenced by individual level personal resources developed through positive employee development and positive attitudes (inside-out factors),...

Parents and teachers who care for and educate young people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) face unique challenges associated with their roles. In this review we investigated the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions in reducing stress and increasing positive behaviours in young people with ASD and their caregivers: parents and teachers. N...

Meditation, mindfulness, and other contemplative interventions have received growing interest and support for different populations. To examine the potential application and benefits of such interventions for employees, we systematically reviewed and meta-analysed their effect on various psychological and performance-based variables in working adul...

School belonging, at both a school and university level, has been well documented as a predictor of academic and psychosocial success. The construct has been examined by scholars in a variety of different professional disciplines (e.g., education, psychology, sociology) and continues to be consistently researched. Although significant contributions...

Employee psychological capital (PsyCap), perceptions of organizational virtue (OV), and work happiness have been shown to be associated within and over time. This study examines selective exposure and confirmation bias as potential processes underlying PsyCap, OV, and work happiness associations. As part of a quasi-experimental study design, school...

The benefits of belonging and feeling connected to school for adolescent mental health and wellbeing are well documented, but how belonging is fostered is less understood. The present article puts forward a new conceptual framework of school belonging based on Bronfenbrenner's (1979) sociological model of human development, using evidence from a ra...

This study explores the implementation of the first of three domains, increasing regulatory abilities, within a trauma-informed positive education (TIPE) approach with flexible learning teachers as they incorporated trauma-informed principles into their daily teaching practice. Trauma-informed teaching approaches have particular relevance for flexi...

This qualitative study explored the presence of growth, distress, deliberate rumination (a type of positive rumination as opposed to intrusive rumination) and dialectical thinking in a sample of unemployed people. Semi-structured interviews with 22 unemployed people were analyzed using deductive thematic analysis. Fryer’s (1992) agency-restriction...

The current study tested the degree to which mindfulness in parents was directly and indirectly related to stress levels in children. A community sample of 68 parent-child dyads completed self-report surveys (Children: Mage = 10.70, SD = 2.6; 52% female, 48% male; Parents: Mage = 42.70, SD = 9.6; 72% female, 28% male). Multiple regression analyses...

This practice paper explores the intersection of school studio-music pedagogy and positive psychology in order to enhance students' learning and engagement. The paper has a practitioner focus and puts forward a new model of studio teaching, the Positive Instruction in Music Studios (PIMS) model that guides teachers through four key positive psychol...

This paper explores the role of a positive education paradigm in mainstream and specialist classrooms for students who have experienced complex trauma resulting from abuse, neglect, violence, or being witness to violence. Existing trauma-informed education focuses on repairing regulatory abilities and repairing disrupted attachment in students. How...

Background Growing evidence is linking gratitude with well-being, yet insufficient scholarly attention has been given to how it is defined, understood and measured. To address this issue, gratitude and gratefulness can be usefully distinguished as two types of appreciative functioning. Applying complex dynamic systems theory, appreciative functioni...

This qualitative study describes the effect of two gratitude interventions designed to trigger emotion-gratitude (gratitude diary) and action-gratitude (gratitude letter) in school leaders. Case study methodology was applied to analyse reflective journals of 27 school leaders. The gratitude diary served to foster a more balanced view of the positiv...

Developing employee wellbeing has recently been recognized as an important way to improve organizational performance. Sloan’s (1987) dual-intervention approach suggests that employee wellbeing can be developed bottom-up, by improving employee psychological wellbeing, or top-down by changing the organization. This longitudinal study explores the ass...

Psychological capital is a positive psychological state that influences employees’ behaviors and attitudes. Research has only recently begun to examine the phenomenon as a shared psychological team state. The purpose of this research is to examine the mediating role of team psychological capital in the relationship between learning climate and outc...

A new Psycho-Social System Approach to Well-Being is presented, in which psychological and social functioning is understood through an empirically derived framework of five domains. A quantitative co-term analysis was performed on 3466 terms within 18,401 PsycINFO® journal documents on topics related to positive psychology (PP) across disciplines s...

Within the context of independent Christian schools, including schools in the Catholic system, Christian education is viewed as a central part of developing the whole child. Often named “Religious and Values Education” it includes values and ethics education. As a part of Religious and Values Education students are usually asked to consider and exp...

Drawing from the fields of positional organizational scholarship and educational administration, this study evaluated the effectiveness of an appreciative inquiry (AI) approach in creating change at a large private school, launched with a one-day AI summit. A sample, pre-test, immediate post-test and 4 month post-test design measured changes in pos...

Drawing on recent advances in the field of positive psychology, we present a multi-dimensional, whole school framework for measuring well-being within the school environment, organized around Seligman's (Flourish, 2011) PERMA model of flourishing. We apply this framework to assess student and staff well-being at an entire school-St. Peter's College...

Seligman recently introduced the PERMA model with five core elements of psychological well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. We empirically tested this multidimensional theory with 516 Australian male students (age 13-18). From an extensive well-being assessment, we selected a subset of items theoreti...

Drawing from the fields of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship and educational administration, this case study reports on the process used in a large K-12 school to implement the strategic goal of fostering student wellbeing. This case study outlines the three strategic phases used to build wellbeing over a two-and-a-half-year...

This applied case study centers on two aspects of Peterson's research as introduced into a large K-12 school in Australia: (i) creating enabling institutions and (ii) applications of character strengths. The paper describes five character strengths initiatives. Four of the strengths initiatives have been integrated into existing school experiences...

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network in the United States reports that up to 40% of students have experienced, or been witness to, traumatic stressors in their short lifetimes. These include home destabilization, violence, neglect, sexual abuse, substance abuse, death, and other adverse childhood experiences. The effects of trauma on a child...

•This study is very interesting to me because it demonstrated that protean attitudes can be dynamic, rising and lowering according to necessity of the employment condition. This opens the door to more studies regarding whether protean orientation, attitudes, etc. are traits or states. The paper presents a longitudinal test of protean career attitud...

As social media use is rising among adolescents, the issue of whether this use leads to positive or negative outcomes warrants greater understanding. This article critically reviews the literature related to this important topic. Specifically, we examine how social media use affects social connectedness in terms of three elements of adolescent deve...

Schools need reliable evidence about the outcomes of meditation programs before they consider if and how such programmes can influence learning agendas, curriculum and timetables. This paper reviewed evidence from 15 peer-reviewed studies of school meditation programmes with respect to three student outcomes: well-being, social competence and acade...

Purpose: Drawing on recent advances in the field of positive psychology, we conducted a pilot evaluation of employee wellbeing using Seligman's (2011) multidimensional PERMA (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment) model of flourishing. We analyzed associations between multiple aspects of employee wellbeing and thr...

The rise in unemployment rates associated with the global financial crisis mean that a timely understanding is needed of the ways in which a person's career attitude influences their reactions to job loss. Much of the research into unemployment has focused on what people lose during unemployment rather than what people can potentially gain during u...