What has all this to do with psychology? In my opinion, psychology belongs to the category of those "magical" sciences that can really both help us “learn living on the earth as human beings" and interfere indirectly. Today, psychology is a quite influential, large and complex area of scientific knowledge with many diverse approaches. The question is what approach in psychology could be most helpful in developing human abilities in people. In this context it seems to be important to refer to a rather new trend in psychology, known as “positive psychology”. Martin Seligman, the ex-president of the American Psychological Association and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the field of positive psychology in 2000. Positive psychology examines healthy states, such as happiness, strengths of character and optimism. This field of modern psychology is opposite to the so-called “negative psychology“.

Current theories of intellectual disabilities underlie an approach centred on a more complete description of the development, known as “the whole child approach”, in which emphasis is placed on the reciprocal relationships between the cognitive and motivational dimensions which characterise development. In particular, subjects with intellectual disabilities, who have experienced repeated failures, may develop an attribution profile characterised by a bias towards primarily external causes. However the consideration of internal causes, such as effort and ability, requires the involvement of higher metacognitive and metalinguistic levels. Consequently, attribution to effort requires an awareness of one’s own internal states. The aim of this study is to compare the attribution style and the knowledge of internal states words (physiological, emotional and cognitive) in adolescents with intellectual disability and typical development. Two groups consisting of 14 participants each were employed, an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group was composed by adolescents with intellectual disability. Participants in the control group were matched to the experimental Ss for mental age. All of the 24 participants were given an Attribution Test (Pepi and Alesi, 2001) and a Internal States Lexicon Test (Alesi and Pepi, 2005). The attribution test consisting of 14 items illustrating either everyday or school-related events in which the main character experiences either success or failure. The participants were asked to attribute the character’s performance to one of five causes: ability; effort; help; luck; or task difficulty.

In the presented research, the ideas of Czech adolescents about their future profession were researched. In the research, data from examinations of 17-year-old respondents were analyzed. The views of their future vocation as well as the vocations of significant others (mother, father, significant other) were acquired by a modified version of the REP-test and assessed from the perspective of their favorableness and cognitive complexity. The aim was to detect relations between the assessment of individual vocations, the components of upbringing analyzed by the Czech Questionnaire for Determining the Upbringing Style in Family (Cáp, Boschek) and self-esteem measured by Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. It was discovered that adolescents, while assessing their potential future vocation, are influenced by family upbringing- there is a strong influence of the factor of emotional warmth in family related to a positive relationship to the adolescents’ vocational future. Moreover, it became evident that the more negative view the adolescents have of the individual vocations, the more differentiated they try to perceive them (higher cognitive complexity), probably in order to develop appropriate coping strategies in their future performance or to justify their negative assessment by a more precise, i.e. not “black and white” perspective. However, in a more detailed analysis, it was revealed that vocations viewed as strongly negative and strongly positive are perceived as less differentiated than vocations assessed in a neutral way, which can be explained by the hypothesis of emotional engagement.

The investigation of teenage orphans’ opinions of both themselves and other people within phenomenological point of view means researching that in their self structure in the broader context than their self – consciousness. The term self structure requires the definition; its sources need to be determined. The article deals with the analysis of solving these problems within some of psychological and philosophical approaches. It was solving these problems by S. Frank, N. Lossky that we used in the experimental study orphans’ opinion about themselves and other people. These scientists belong to Russian intuitivist group that is the part of phenomenological branch of non Marxian theory of knowledge. Their conception has been developed in modern Russian psychology by F. Mihaylov and V. Muhina. The self structure is understood as state of person’s mind (I) to subject (Subject). The “I” is detachment himself by person as separable side, which function is act of distinguishing. The “Subject” includes the subject itself and person’s sense, attitude and feeling, connected with the subject, given to the person in perception intuitively. Self structure’s sources are both isolating, connected with person’s instinctive selfish inclinations, and involving into communications, connected with person’s inclination for searching contacts with others. The article offers the typology of orphan’s strategies in isolating and involving into communications with the others, formatted theirs’ self structure. The correlation between orphans’ opinion about the others and their self structures was been confirmed.

The study deals with individual factors that are related to more or less adaptive behavior in the situation of job loss. Problem- and emotion-oriented coping strategies, their antecedents and consequences were in the focus. The data were obtained through a two-wave longitudinal study on a sample of 462 persons of various demographic and work characteristics who had recently lost their jobs. In the first wave, data on their demographic and work characteristics, experienced resources (financial situation, core self-evaluation, social support, job involvement and job-search self-efficacy) and strategies of proactive job search, occasional work, job-loss distancing and job devaluation were collected. In a follow-up study, conducted after six months, employment status and perceived work uncertainty were in the focus. The results can be summarized in several general findings: (1) Different patterns of individual characteristics were related to the tendency to use the individual strategy more or less intensively, and the strategies showed different adaptive roles in terms of their relations to measured outcomes; (2) The availability of coping resources is a significant predictor of the most adaptive, problem-oriented, strategy of proactive job search; (3) Some measured resources were not related to emotion-oriented strategies, and some of them stood in negative relations; (4) Proactive job search, but not the measured resources, was a significant independent predictor of reemployment six months later, in addition to age and education level; (5) Employment status, measured after six months, was a significant independent predictor of the concurrent experience of work uncertainty – reemployed individuals experienced less anxiety regarding their future work; (6) Demographic variables and measured resources served alongside current employment status as significant predictors of work uncertainty, but strategies did not.

The research reported here was designed to investigate the critical role played by certain factors implicated in the mental representation of text, and to establish whether their role varies significantly as a function of developmental age. Specifically, it was decided to analyse, in a sample of 180 subjects was selected from three different age groups (7, 10 and 18 years of age respectively), the role of such factors in mediating and influencing the generation of the inferences needed to understand a piece of text characterised by a sequence of information which flows in a logical order, but leads to a conclusion which is contrary to the expectations evoked by the text. In line with this objective, it was decided to take into account factors related to encoding (added information about the key object – a title), those involved in recall (inferential tests regarding the object and action of change), as well as purely metacognitive factors, such as evaluation of one’s own comprehension and awareness of textual incongruence, whose presence, according to our assumptions, should facilitate the formulation of inferential hypotheses. It would thus seem that inferential processing is powerfully influenced both by cognitive and structural factors, factors which can play a role during both encoding and recall. The results reported here tend to confirm the hypothesis that there is indeed a significant developmental trend in the role played by those factors involved in the coherent representation of text and in the formulation of inferences. The data suggest that children in the youngest age group obtain the greatest advantage from clues in reaching a more correct representation of the text concerned. It is concluded that inferential processes do not serve only to make connections between propositions, but to construct a coherent mental representation of text (Kintsh, 1994; Zwaan, 1994, 1996).

The aim of the research is to analyze the psychological problems of the new generation in Latvia at the present moment. The currently existing psychological issues are inherited from the 20s and 30s of the previous century. In Latvia the topicality in the field of psychology has always been associated with a sound development of a physically-fitted, mentally-balanced as well as meaningful personality that might benefit society. Latvian psychological theories are based on the humanistic and philosophical approach that is based on the human ideas from the 90ies of 20th century. Such Latvian psychologists as Imants Plotnieks, Arija Karpova, Dzidra Meikšane and others researched the following topics: ’self-esteem’ ‚‘self-regulation“, ‘self-actualization“, ‘identity“ as well as “positive self-concept“. The scientific issue of this article is to compare and to analyze the two dimensions of the Latvian psychology history, i.e., firstly, what it is based on and, secondly, why the reason of a positive psychology concept is rooted in Latvian traditions. The methodology of the research is meta-analysis, qualitative-quantitative approach, and experimental design from three cases analyse. There are three cases analysed in this article- author of this article and students from Riga Teacher Training and Education management academy, all cases analysed well-being aspect resilience and positive intervention, but there is different aspect of resilience has been analysed in each example. There are some similar ideas from Latvian psychology history are comparing with temporary psychology of Latvia in this article, ideas – close and different with positive psychology as methodological branch of psychology.

In Romania there are only a few parental education programs being carried out, but most of them are not properly/scientifically measured in terms of efficiency. For this reason, the purpose of the research was the implementation and scientific validation of a training program for developing the parental competence. The parental competence was defined as a system of knowledge, skills, capabilities, abilities and habits that would allow the parent to successfully fulfill the parental responsibilities and also prevent/deal with crisis situations in a manner that would contribute to the child’s development (Glaveanu, 2009). The above-mentioned term became widely spread in Romania after 2010, when the Integrated National Strategy for Creating and Developing Parental Competence was published. The Strategy is supported by the Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sports and its deadline is in the summer of 2012. As a conclusion, the results proved the internal validation of the training program (according to Vaughn’s criteria, 2005). It is yet to be proven the external validation regarding the impact of the training program on the child’s overall development (Kirkpatrick, 2006; Vaughn, 2005) and this will be done by applying the training program on an expanded/national level.