Faculty Advisor
Ken Hart, PhD.
Current Student Members
Amanda Robinson, Phillip Ianni, Wegdan Hanna, Tyler Carey (now at UVic)
Recent Past Student Members
Kevin Rounding (now at Queens),Alex Milosevic, Michelle Carroll (now at McMaster) Terry Singh, Kevin Gomes, Tobi Wilson, Olivia McGarragle (now at Wayne State), Erin Warriner, Norm Fazza, Dory Fiisell, Chris Hope, Andrea Kapeleris, Adam Pocrnic, Erin Alleva, Nicki Gervais.
Interests and Activities
Since the year 2009, we have used the internet to collect two large datasets from student populations. Both datasets contain a host of variables related to the fields of positive psychology, clinical-health psychology and addictive behaviors. We call the 2009 project “The Wellness Lifestyles Study” and we call the 2010 project “The Student Strengths Study”. The 2009 project has 568 respondents and is cross sectional in design. The 2010 project is a quasi-experimental longitudinal design in which pre-semester and post-semester data were obtained from 220 students who took Dr. Hart’s strengths-based curriculum entitled “Positive Psychology.” Data were also obtained from a sample of 198 other students who were not exposed to strengths-based education.
A number of poster presentations have been given reporting results of both datasets. In a recent conference presentation dated May 2011 (poster attached below), preliminary analyses of the 2010 project were reported. Examination of end of semester marks obtained from the University of Windsor’s Registrar’s office indicate that marks improved more in the Positive Psychology (PP) students. These same students experienced relatively greater improvements in “academic flow” (vital engagement) and “academic happiness”. Finally, compared to the non-PP students, the PP students also showed greater reductions in alcohol abuse. We continue to explore both of the datasets in the form of senior thesis projects and Master’s Thesis projects and in the form of extracurricular (independent) research.