Illustration by Joanne Chung
Welcome to the Growth Initiative lab page! My name is Eranda Jayawickreme and I’m the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and senior research fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. I received my Ph.D. in positive and social/personality psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. My research, which integrates my interests in both philosophy and psychology, focuses on post-traumatic growth as positive personality change, moral personality, wisdom, well-being and integrative theories of personality. I have worked with populations in Rwanda, Sri Lanka and various populations in the USA.
I’m currently the Project Leader for the Clarifying the Virtue Profile of the Excellent Thinker Project, with support from the John Templeton Foundation. I’m also a Science of Honesty Project Leader for the Honesty Project, an initiative exploring new directions in the study of the character virtue of honesty.
Until recently, I was the Project Leader (with Michael Lamb) of the Exemplar Interventions to Develop Character Project, an initiative that examined the role of moral exemplars in character development. I was also formally the Project Co-Leader for the Pathways to Character Project, an initiative examining the possibilities for the strengthening of character following adversity, challenge or failure, and the Project Leader for the Promoting Intellectual Humility Among Middle-School Students: Developing an Educational Film and Preliminary Intervention Strategy Project. From 2011 to 2014, I was the Project Leader for the Growth Initiative, which focused on improving the quality of research on post-traumatic growth.
I currently serve as an associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences, as well as for the journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, and am active in the Association for Research of Personality. In July 2023, I will become a senior associate editor of the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
My awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science (which recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field), Wake Forest’s 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award, a Mellon Refugee Initiative Fund Fellowship, and grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the European Association for Personality Psychology, and the Asia Foundation/ USAID. I am also a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).
Here’s a link to my CV (updated in August 2022).
This Hidden Brain interview with Shankar Vedantam is a good introduction to my thinking and research on post-traumatic growth
Here are links to a 2019 interview I did on NPR’s Central Time, a 2020 CNN.com article, a 2021 article in the Guardian, and a 2022 BBC interview (also available in French) in which I discuss the challenges of doing good research on post-traumatic growth
Here’s a link to a 2022 NY Times article on how children may recover in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Order our OUP volume on post-traumatic growth here
Learn more about the Association for Research in Personality’s 2021 conference (which I co-chaired with Joanne Chung) here
Read our 2021 consensus paper on post-traumatic growth in the Journal of Personality here
Visit our Pathways to Character site here and learn more about our recent funding competition here
Read our 2019 paper on post-traumatic growth in Current Directions in Psychological Science here
Read our 2014 target article on post-traumatic growth in the European Journal of Personality here
Read the special issue of the Journal of Value Inquiry based on our 2017 Wisdom Seminar at Fordham University here
Read about the relevance of Whole Trait Theory for the study of morality and ethics here, here, and here
View the call for proposals for our special issue of the European Journal of Personality on “Integrating Post-Traumatic Growth and Personality Change” here
Learn more about the cancelled Pan-Asian Summit on Wisdom, Morality and Character in the Polarized World (to be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in May 2020) here
Visit the Beacon Project site here
Visit the Character Project site here
Here’s a link to a 2019 article that discusses the question of whether adversity can build character
Here’s a link to a 2018 podcast where I discuss Whole Trait Theory and its implications for the person-situation debate
Here are two articles that discuss my work on intellectual humility
Here’s a link to an article at Slate.com where I discuss the question of whether adversity can build character
Here a link to a NY Times piece about some research I did with my colleague Erik Helzer on well-being and control
Learn more about my research on character interventions here
Here’s a video of me discussing well-being at the 2014 NAIS Well-Being Summit
I’m also Lisa Blee‘s husband. Her latest book’s worth a read
And if you came to this website looking for answers to the question of how you could become happier, you could do worse than start here. Or here.