Some research highlights:
Click here to download "Taking skills seriously: Toward an integrative model and agenda for social, emotional, and behavioral Skills”, published in in Current Directions in Psychological Science (in press)
Click here to download "Great expectations: Adolescents' intentional self-regulation predicts career aspiration and expectation consistency”, published in in Journal of Vocational Behavior (2020)
Click here to download "Assessing the Implicit Theory of Willpower for Strenuous Mental Activities Scale: Multigroup, across-gender, and cross-cultural measurement invariance and convergent and divergent validity," published in in Psychological Assessment (2019)
Click here to download "Trajectories of academic performance across compulsory schooling and thriving in young adulthood” published in in Child Development (2018)
Click here to download "First Evidence of the Backup Plan Paradox," published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Napolitano & Freund 2017)
Research Foci
Theme 1: Setting, striving for, and succeeding at long-term goals
Intentional self-regulatory skills
How do people promote their positive development? Do our goals and how we pursue them shape who we are and who we become? I have argued (e.g., Napolitano & Freund, 2018; Napolitano, Bowers, Gestsdottir, & Chase 2011) that intentional self-regulation is a vital component to understanding development across the life span. To some degree, all of my work explores how people create their positive development through goal setting and striving.
Backup plans
When are backup plans supportive safety nets for goal pursuit, and when do their costs subvert motivation to continue using Plan A? (Napolitano & Freund, 2016). Our empirical work indicates backup plans have "hidden costs" and may often undermine goal achievement (Napolitano & Freund, 2017). We are now exploring the use and usefulness of backup plans across the life span, with a recent focus on adolescence (e.g., the impact of investing in post-secondary “safety school” applications.
Theme 2: Thriving during adolescence and young adulthood
Social, emotional, and behavioral skills
Beyond intelligence and opportunity, what personal attributes are associated with success in school, work, relationships, and other domains? Across several domains (economics, psychology, education),suggests that thriving people have the capacities to build and maintain their social relationships, to regulate their emotions, and to manage their goal-directed behaviors. We term these social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills (Soto, Napolitano, & Roberts, in press). Our current focus is developing and refining the BESSI, a comprehensive measure of more than 30 SEB skills.
Positive Youth Development
How do we match the youth strengths to contextual strengths to promote thriving? One solution may be outside of school-time mentoring programs that support adolescent's intentional self-regulatory skills (Napolitano, Bowers, Arbeit, Chase, Geldhof, Lerner, & Lerner, 2014).