The aim of this paper is to review school-based interventions that have been designed to foster student wellbeing and academic performance by following a positive psychology approach that seeks to cultivate positive emotions, resilience and positive character strengths. Following the calls of the 21st century education movement for schools to incorporate student wellbeing as a focus of learning, the current paper outlines the positive psychology movement and reviews evidence from 12 school-based positive psychology interventions that have been systematically evaluated. The evidence shows that positive psychology programs are significantly related to student wellbeing, relationships and academic performance. The paper makes suggestions for the further development of positive psychology interventions in schools and explores the factors that could allow positive psychology to be extended, and more systematically embedded, into schools.

Typically, asking people to reinstate the context of events increases their recall of those events; however, research findings have been mixed with children. We tested whether the principle underlying context reinstatement applies to children as it does to adults. This underlying principle, encoding specificity, suggests that the greater the overlap between study context cues and retrieval context cues, the more information that people should recall. In the current experiment, four age groups (7-year-olds, 9-year-olds, 11-year-olds and adults) took part in an encoding specificity procedure. At study, participants saw cue–target word pairs in which the cue word was either a strong or a weak associate of the target word (e.g., ice–COLD; blow–COLD). During an immediate cued recall test, participants were presented with the same strong or weak cue words and new, extra-list cue words. Overall, children and adults recalled more targets when they were presented with the same cue words at study and test, regardless of whether the cues were strong or weak. This finding suggests that encoding specificity applies to children as well as adults. We discuss the implications of these results.

This study examined the specific impact of remembered childhood and adolescent teasing on different dimensions of body image in young adults. A total of 113 participants (43 men and 70 women) indicated that they had been teased about their weight or appearance. The results revealed that the frequency of being teased about one's appearance was the only significant predictor of appearance satisfaction in women. Overweight preoccupation was not predicted by weight or appearance teasing. For men, the perceived distress of appearance and weight-related teasing predicted appearance satisfaction and overweight preoccupation respectively. The results suggest that different types of teasing can have differential impacts on the body image of young men and women. The results identify the need for prevention and intervention programs to address the problem of teasing in late primary and early high school children.

A program to help girls avoid chronic partner abuse was piloted as an elective program in 10 Victorian secondary schools. The program was based on the Dyadic Slippery-Slope model of chronic partner abuse. It aimed to build participants' skills in recognising and responding assertively to early warning-sign behaviours by a partner. Five modules were delivered over one day: Choosing, Noticing, Responding, Ending and Bouncing Back. This paper reports on the results of a noncontrolled pretest to posttest evaluation, with a 3-month follow-up period. Seventy-five girls (M = 14.7 years) contributed preprogram and postprogram data. After the program, they demonstrated heightened awareness of the risks associated with warning-sign behaviours, increased self-confidence, decreased victim blaming, and more assertive intentions. Participants' assertiveness was related to their risk awareness, but only following the program. The program's focus on skill building is believed to have been crucial to its success. Although skills-based empowerment is a promising approach to preventing chronic partner abuse, more rigorous and extensive evaluation of this approach is needed.

While the etiology of gender roles across the lifespan remains a matter for debate, conformity to masculine norms has been associated with poorer physical and mental health outcomes amongst men. This study reports data from two online samples of Australian men (Ns = 343, 525), focusing on age group differences for masculinity and depression. Consistent with prediction, cross-sectional data reported that conformity to masculine norms attenuated throughout the lifespan. Further, both samples indicated that the relationship between masculinity and depression increased with age. Findings are interpreted within the context of men resolving gender role–related conflicts across the lifespan.