University Psychology Essay: Character Strengths & Positive Outcomes

This essay explores the impact of character strengths on the positive outcomes of first-year university students, drawing on research in positive psychology. It defines character strengths as essential for lifelong development and well-being, linking them to traits like teamwork, honesty, and perseverance. The essay references studies that correlate character strengths with academic success, student satisfaction, and autonomous learning, highlighting interventions that enhance self-efficacy and self-esteem. The findings suggest that focusing on character strengths can significantly improve student performance and overall experience, emphasizing the importance of these traits in achieving positive results within the university setting. The essay concludes by reinforcing the benefits of character strengths for student success.

Running head: PSYCHOLOGY
How might a focus on character strengths lead to positive outcomes for a student in their first
year at university?
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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PSYCHOLOGY
Focus on character strengths leads to positive outcome for a student in their first year at
university.
Introduction
Character strengths are mainly the basis of optimum life-long developments as well as
thriving. A family of productive traits that are reflected in one’s thought, feelings and
behaviors can be said as good characters (Park & Peterson, 2009). However, many researches
give a clear result that character strengths are associated to important features of individual as
well as social well-beings while different strengths forecast different aftermath.
Discussion
In everyday interaction, people mostly talk modestly and reluctantly about their
strengths. This hesitance to talk about the strengths is greatly contemplated in psychology
where strengths would have been the issue of very little logical empirical research. In a study
by Gustems-Carnicer & Calderón done in 2016, mainly defines, analyzes and evaluates the
character strengths along with virtues and coping strategies of the college students. However,
positive correlations have been found among the six virtues and three of the coping strategies
after the collection of data from ninety-one college students. In 2009, another study done by
Lounsbury et al., which researched on the graduate students about their values that are in
action character strengths in association with two of the indices academic victories which are
student satisfaction as well as grade point average. However, the results are explained from
the outlook of the lifespan development, behavior of the college student, and theory of
identity, ‘emerging adulthood’, and big five-personality model and personality research on
individual’s satisfaction in life. Therefore, this study has further indicated through its analysis
of the data collected that character strengths are definitely associated to the academic victory

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PSYCHOLOGY
of college students, where their victory is functioning as the student satisfaction as well as
performance of their academics (Linley & Harrington, 2006).
Macaskill & Denovan in 2013 did another study where they have resembled positive
psychology to aim at developing confidence among the first year students to promote
autonomous learning. Character strength has been evaluated taking 214 students of the
university on the very first day of this study. However, during conducting this study in
around two weeks the students are presented with three top strengths of them, which were
provided in the modules of study skills as a piece of their psycho-educational intervention
that has been outlined to enhance their self-efficacy and self-esteem. The outcome further
indicates that the students are more self-confident after the psycho educational intervention
and so an increase in their level of autonomous learning has been found as compared to the
control group of 40 students who experienced no such interventions (Macaskill & Denovan,
2013). It can be further said that character strengths were as expected was related with self-
efficacy, self-esteem and autonomous learning in the process that are meaningful
conceptually. However, it can be said from the studies that character strengths have overall
showed a great amount of connection with the academic performance that is teamwork,
honesty, perseverance, self-regulation and prudence.
Conclusion
Thus, to conclude the essay it can be said that from the previous researches done on
the university students clearly states that focus based on character strengths can guide to
positive results for the students in the university. Character strengths however, have been
already defined as the optimal long run developments and thriving in an individual.

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PSYCHOLOGY
References
Gustems-Carnicer, J., & Calderón, C. (2016). Virtues and character strengths related to
approach coping strategies of college students. Social Psychology of Education, 19(1),
77-95.
Linley, P.A. & Harrington, S. (2006, February). Playing to your strengths. The Psychologist,
19 (2) pp. 86-89
Lounsbury, J. W., Fisher, L. A., Levy, J. J., & Welsh, D. P. (2009). An Investigation of
Character Strengths in Relation to the Academic Success of College
Students. Individual Differences Research, 7(1).
Macaskill, A., & Denovan, A. (2013). Developing autonomous learning in first year
university students using perspectives from positive psychology. Studies in Higher
Education, 38(1), 124-142.
Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2009). Character strengths: Research and practice. Journal of
college and character, 10(4).