In A Psychology of Human Strengths, great minds of contemporary psychology set a research agenda for the scientific study of human strengths. Scholars in a variety of fields have each directed their attention to positive psychology and focused their work through a lens of human strengths. What results is a comprehensive volume with remarkable breadth, depth, and balance--one that provides a forward-looking forum for the discussion of the purpose, pitfalls, and future of the psychology of human strengths.

Aspinwall (psychology, U. of Utah) and Staudinger (psychology, Dresden U., Germany) present these 23 essays as a conceptual and forward looking compendium attempting to draw the contours of a psychology that concentrates on the understanding and cultivation of human strengths. Largely contributed by American and German psychologists, the contributions respond to such issues as the historical psychological treatment of strengths, its traditional limitations, the possible contributions of a psychology of strengths, and recommendations for development in research and theory.
Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A psychology of human strengths : some central issues of an emerging field / Lisa G. Aspinwall and Ursula M. Staudinger — Human strengths as the orchestration of wisdom and selective optimization with compensation / Paul B. Baltes and Alexandra M. Freund — The human's greatest strength : other humans / Ellen Berscheid — Constructive cognition, personal goals, and the social embedding of personality / Nancy Cantor — A conception of personality for a psychology of human strengths : personality as an agentic, self-regulatiing system / Gian Vittorio Caprara and Daniel Cervone — Human aging : why is even good news taken as bad? / Laura L. Casrstensen and Susan T. Charles — Three human strengths / Charles S. Carver and Michael F. Scheier — The malleability of sex differences in response to changing social roles / Alice H. Eagly and Amanda B. Dickman — Toward a positive psychology : social development and cultural contributions / Nancy Eisenberg and Vivian Ota Wang — Light and dark in the psychology of human strengths : the example of psychogerontology / Rocâio Fernâandez-Ballesteros — Intervention as a major tool of a psychology of human strengths : examples from organizational change and innovation / Dieter Frey, Eva Jonas, and Tobias Greitemeyer — Judgmental heuristics : human strengths or human weaknesses? / Dale Griffin and Daniel Kahneman — Positive affect as a source of human strength / Alice M. Isen — The parametric unimodel of human judgment : a fanfare to the common thinker / Arie W. Kruglanski ... et al. — Turning adversity to advantage : on the virtues of the coactivation of positive and negative emotions / Jeff T. Larsen ... et al. — A holistic person approach for research on positive development / David Magnusson and Joseph L. Mahoney — Harnessing willpower and socioemotional intelligence to enhance human agency potential / Walter Mischel and Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton — The motivational sources of creativity as viewed from the paradigm of positive psychology / Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — Ironies of the human condition : well-being and health on the way to mortality / Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer — Political symbols and collective moral action / David O. Sears — Positive clinical psychology / Martin E. P. Seligman and Christopher Peterson — Driven to despair : why we need to redefine concept and measurement of intelligence / Robert J. Sternberg — The ecology of human strengths / Daniel Stokols.