By definition, moral character is the existence or lack of virtues such as integrity, courage, fortitude, honesty and loyalty.
With that as my foundation today, I have a question for you. The Society of Morality gives us the tools we need to take actions which are not always in our own best interests. The empathic response agency is proactive and encourages us to take actions to help others.
Values reflect our sense of right and wrong. They help us grow and develop. They help us create the future we want. The decisions we make every day are a reflection of our values. This personal trait follows through on commitments and proactively create or accept accountability for your behavior and choices. You have a confident yet modest opinion of your own self-importance.
With this honorable trait you have a learning and growth mindset and the desire to express and experience gratitude for what you have, rather than expecting you deserve more. This character traits example feels deep sympathy and pity for the suffering and misfortune of others, and you have a desire to do something to alleviate their suffering.
Using discernment, compassion, and integrity, this a character trait strives to make decisions and take actions based on what you consider the ultimate best course or outcome for all involved. You make conscious, intentional decisions to let go of resentment and anger toward someone for an offense — whether or not forgiveness is sought by the offender. Forgiveness may or may not include pardoning, restoration, or reconciliation. With this virtuous attribute you are able to be your real and true self, without pretension, posturing, or insincerity.
In spite of fear of danger, discomfort, or pain, this good human quality requires the mental fortitude to carry on with a commitment, plan, or decision, knowing it is the right or best course of action. This good quality is willing to offer time, energy, efforts, emotions , words, or assets without the expectation of something in return.
This character trait is knowledgeable of basic good manners , common courtesies, and etiquette, and are willing to apply those to all people you encounter. You desire to learn the personal skills of politeness in order to enhance your relationships and self-esteem. Kindness is a positive attribute of being considerate, helpful, and benevolent to others. This virtuous trait is motivated by a positive disposition and the desire for warm and pleasant interactions.
This character trait has the ability to be loving toward those you love means showing them through your words, actions, and expressions how deeply you care about them. Optimism is a virtuous example of having a sense of hopefulness and confidence about the future. It involves a positive mental attitude in which you interpret life events, people, and situations in a promising light. This character quality can be consistently depended upon to follow through on your commitments, actions, and decisions.
You do what you say you will do. You are thorough, careful, efficient, organized, and vigilant in your efforts, based on your own principles or sense of what is right. With this good character trait, you are able, through good habits or willpower, to overcome your desires or feelings in order to follow the best course of action or to rise to your commitments or principles.
Developing these traits of good character can be difficult to foster and maintain, but they afford so many positive benefits to improve the quality of your life. When you have ambitiousness, you possess the keen desire to achieve your goals. Whether you are seeking to make more money, build a business, excel in your career, or find the love of your life, your ambition gives you the motivation to make it happen.
When you are encouraging, you offer hope, strength, and positive reinforcement to others. You go out of your way to give someone support and confidence. This is an excellent trait as it reveals your ability to understand and care for others in an emotionally intelligent way.
Because of your encouraging nature, others are naturally attracted to you. The ability to forgive yourself and others reveals that you have a balanced perspective of human nature and the flaws inherent in all of us.
You are able to let go of grudges and resentment which in turn frees you and anyone who might have offended you. When you possess the trait of being considerate, you show an ability to think of other people as well as yourself.
You show care to others and seek to understand how they might feel in certain situations and adjust your behavior accordingly. To be considerate also means being polite and respectful — even of those at a different station in life from you. Your ability to be thorough and consistent in your efforts mean you can expect more success and respect in your personal and professional life. Through activities, games, lessons , and real-world experiences, children can grow in character and understand how these important traits make them happier, more successful, and more resilient.
Teaching traits like kindness, respect, and responsibility also help children develop self-esteem, as well as moral and ethical values. When teaching these traits to children, adult role models should consider the following:.
Setting this good example means that adults must look at themselves to assess their own skills and work to improve any areas where their traits might be weak. Oscar Wilde once said, Sincerity is one of the most important qualities in a person. And once you can fake that you have it made. By the same token, there are others who deserve better reputations than they have. Though reputation is merely a perception it still has very significant real impact.
A good reputation for integrity, for instance, is a primary determinant of credibility and trust, two very marketable assets. Similarly, the once highly respected accounting firm Arthur Anderson had to change its name to Accenture to try to recapture trust after its involvement in the Enron scandal. Whether fair or not, the indisputable truth is that people, companies and institutions are likely to be judged by their last worst act.
Thus, some unwisely became so preoccupied with protecting their image that they actually made things worse, undermining their character and destroying their reputations, by concealing or creating facts to make them look better.
Also in line with previous findings Park and Peterson, ; Ruch et al. School achievement was negatively correlated with age, and girls received higher ratings in positive classroom behavior than boys. Table 1. As shown in Table 1 , 15 of the 24 character strengths were correlated with positive classroom behavior with the numerically highest coefficients being found for hope, perseverance, zest, love of learning, and prudence. Similarly, 14 of the 24 character strengths were related to teacher-rated school achievement.
Perspective, leadership, perseverance, love of learning, hope, and prudence yielded the numerically highest coefficients. The significant correlations were exclusively positive. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the 24 character strengths when added in a second step after controlling for age and sex in the first step explained Table 2 shows the results of the mediation analyses Hayes, For perspective and leadership, there was both an indirect and a direct effect.
For the remaining character strengths, the results were consistent with a full mediation—there was only an indirect effect and no significant direct effect. Humor was the only character strength that yielded a significant direct effect, but no indirect effect. Thus, the positive relationship between humor and school achievement was not mediated by positive classroom behavior.
Table 2. Results of mediation analyses for character strengths as predictors of overall school achievement with positive classroom behavior as mediator controlling for age and sex. Study 1 was primarily designed to replicate previous findings by Weber and Ruch , and to extend these findings by looking at whether positive classroom behavior mediates the link between character strengths and school achievement on the level of single strengths.
We found that a large number of character strengths were linked to teacher-reported positive classroom behavior and school achievement, and that many of the relationships with school achievement were fully mediated by positive classroom behavior. Perspective, leadership, and humor also showed direct effects on school achievement, independent of positive classroom behavior. The interpretation of these results is somewhat limited by the fact that the ratings of positive classroom behavior and school achievement were done by only one teacher, and at the same time.
In consequence, the two ratings may be somewhat confounded. Also, we only assessed overall school achievement and we do not know how much emphasis the teachers put on academic vs.
Even though it can be assumed that these ratings are valid, it would be desirable to obtain the actual grades and ratings of positive classroom behavior that several teachers have agreed on. Especially when studying the relevance of good character in secondary school classrooms, this would be desirable, since students are in touch with a broader group of teachers than they are in primary school.
Looking at grades in academic and non-academic subjects separately would also help to better understand what potential mechanisms are involved in the association between character strengths, positive classroom behavior, and school achievement.
Study 2 aims at extending the findings of Study 1 in three ways: a by studying students in secondary school, b by using a rating system for positive behavior that has been established in schools and reflects the perspective of several teachers, and c by studying associations with actual grades in both academic and non-academic subjects.
We expect that the results of Study 1 will be replicated in Study 2, although different measures for both positive classroom behavior and school achievement are used.
We expect somewhat lower effect sizes, since previous research has shown that personality traits tend to play a stronger role in predicting achievement on the primary school level than on secondary school level Poropat, Similarly, we expect the correlation between positive classroom behavior and school achievement to be somewhat lower, while still substantial. As a consequence, we also expect that there will be fewer character strengths showing an indirect effect on school achievement through positive classroom.
More importantly, we expect stronger relationships for grades in academic than for grades in non-academic subjects, since character strengths should support achievement-related behavior especially in those subjects that require sustained effort and that are less dependent of a specific talent, such as musicality. The sample consisted of German-speaking secondary school students We used the German version Ruch et al. Only one scale had an alpha coefficient below 0.
The positive classroom behavior teacher ratings is a standard used by schools in Switzerland to describe positive behavior in the classroom. In this study, we used ratings of achievement-related e. We tested the dimensionality of the teacher ratings using principal component analysis. One eigenvalue exceeded unity eigenvalues were 3. Parallel analysis Horn, suggested unidimensionality as well. In the analyses, we consequently used a mean score across all seven items. We also calculated an average across grades in mathematics and German language MG , the two grades commonly considered most important, and an average for grades in non-academic subjects NA; including art, music, and physical education.
Data for this study were collected in 14 classrooms of four secondary schools in German-speaking Switzerland, which represented two different educational levels. Students and, in case of participating students under the age of 14 years, also a parent or legal guardian gave active consent. Classroom teachers were instructed on how to oversee the completion of the questionnaire and how to respond to questions. They read standardized instructions to the students who completed the self-report questionnaire as part of a larger study in the classroom setting.
Students received written feedback on their individual rank order of character strengths and were provided with information on the meaning of the character strengths of the VIA classification.
In preliminary analyses, we computed means and standard deviations for all assessed variables. To address our research questions, we computed partial correlations controlling for age, sex, and school level of the 24 character strengths with positive classroom behavior, and three different indicators of school achievement: GPA, an average across grades in mathematics and German language MG , and an average for grades in non-academic subjects NA; including art, music, physical education.
As a second step, we conducted mediation analyses to test the direct and indirect effect of character strengths on school success as a third step see Study 1. There were only a few correlations with age, and scores on bravery, kindness, beauty, and religiousness were higher for girls than for boys.
Teamwork, modesty, and hope were higher in students attending schools with augmented requirements, whereas religiousness was higher in students attending schools with basic requirements. Positive classroom behavior was positively correlated with age, and GPA was unrelated to age and sex. Both positive classroom behavior and GPA were higher for students attending schools with augmented requirements than for students attending schools with basic requirements.
Table 3. Perseverance, social intelligence, prudence, self-regulation, and hope were positively correlated with teacher-rated positive classroom behavior see Table 3. Notably more character strengths were positively associated with school achievement, as operationalized by the grade average across all academic subjects: Love of learning, perspective, perseverance, zest, forgiveness, prudence, gratitude, and hope.
Correlations with the average of grades in mathematics and German language were similar although non-significant for perspective, prudence and gratitude. Multiple hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the 24 character strengths when added in a second step after controlling for age, sex, and school level in the first step , explained 7. To test the direct and indirect effects of character strengths on school achievement GPA across academic subjects , mediation analyses were conducted using the bootstrapping procedure suggested by Hayes Figure 1 shows an illustration of the tested mediation model and results are displayed in Table 4.
Table 4. As shown in Table 4 , eight character strengths yielded total effects on school achievement, as operationalized by GPA across academic subjects. Hope yielded both a direct effect and an indirect effect through positive classroom behavior, which is in line with a partial mediation.
Perseverance and prudence yielded indirect effects without direct effects, which is in line with a full mediation of the relationship by positive classroom behavior, and there was an additional indirect effect for social intelligence and self-regulation.
Love of learning and forgiveness yielded only a direct effect, thus their relationship with school achievement was not mediated by positive classroom behavior. The present study extends the knowledge on the role of character strengths for positive behavior and achievement at school.
Using a sample of primary school students, results of Study 1 showed that hope, perseverance, zest, love of learning, prudence, perspective and self-regulation were most substantially correlated with teacher-rated positive behavior in the classroom. For 12 of the 24 character strengths, mediation analyses revealed an indirect effect through positive classroom behavior on school achievement. Using a sample of secondary school students and actual grades, results of Study 2 showed that hope, self-regulation, prudence, perseverance, and social intelligence were related to positive classroom behavior, that eight character strengths were related to GPA across academic grades, and that none of the character strengths was correlated with grades in non-academic subjects.
Mediation analyses revealed that the associations with GPA were partly mediated by positive classroom behavior for some of the character strengths, but not for others.
There were some striking similarities in the results of both studies. In both studies, perseverance, social intelligence, prudence, self-regulation, and hope were related to positive classroom behavior, and love of learning, perspective, perseverance, zest, prudence, gratitude, and hope were related to school achievement. Compared to typical effect sizes for the relationship between personality traits and academic achievement, the effect sizes that we found for several character strengths are comparable to or exceed those reported for conscientiousness in meta-analyses cf.
Poropat, Perseverance, prudence and hope were associated with both positive classroom-behavior and school achievement across the two studies presented here.
Social intelligence and self-regulation showed replicable associations across both samples only with positive classroom behavior, but were not related consistently with school achievement. Love of learning, perspective, zest and gratitude showed a replicable association with school achievement, but were not consistently associated with positive classroom behavior. The ninth strength, teamwork, only showed associations with both variables in Study 1, but not Study 2.
In addition, zest was robustly associated with school achievement. While love of learning is specifically related to positive experience while learning new things, zestful students are generally more vital, alert and energetic cf. Zest is highly related to experiencing positive affective states in general e. This suggests that being zestful is a helpful resource also for school achievement, e. All character strengths that yielded indirect effects on school achievement through positive classroom behavior in Study 2 perseverance, prudence, self-regulation, hope had also yielded indirect effects in Study 1.
Hope additionally yielded a direct effect on school achievement in Study 2. The effects of perseverance and prudence on school achievement were fully mediated by positive classroom behavior in both studies.
Perseverance and prudence thus seem to be related to school achievement mostly through mechanisms that are observed and appreciated by the teachers. This seems plausible as both of these strengths are theoretically linked with adherence to rules and conforming with expectations, while controlling impulses and feelings that are repugnant to those. Hope, on the other hand, seems to affect school achievement also through mechanisms that are not captured by teacher-rated positive classroom behavior.
There were also differences between the results of the two studies.
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