Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Children and Positive Psychology: How Media Can Contribute (#237)

Yalda T Uhls 1
  1. UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

A long history of research documenting the significance of character strengths and social/emotional skills underscores their importance to academic and life success. Just as educators and families have turned to media as resources for imparting literacy skills and historical knowledge, so too can they draw upon media's potential to support the positive development of youth. In this talk, I will examine how media can best support character development and review a multi-year initiative developed by the national non-profit Common Sense Media. This resulted in a character-tagging system that identifies movies and TV programs, which promote core character strengths and life skills. We began the initiative with a determination of which skills and virtues matter most for positive youth development. In keeping with Common Sense's research-based tradition, we reviewed multiple academic fields, including moral character virtues, social and emotional learning, and positive psychology. After  launch, we tested the resource with parents and educators in focus groups and in a small intervention study, conducted in three different cities and in English and Spanish.  We will also share research on a newly developed feature, discussion prompts for families to inspire developmentally appropriate critical thinking around lessons about character that are embedded within storytelling.