Maria Lúcia Kern

Biographic Data

ID1016528
NAMEMaria Lúcia Kern
GIVEN NAMESMaria Lúcia
FAMILY NAMEKern
SIGNATUREKERN M L
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Pennsylvania
ORCID0000-0003-4300-598X
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS40
TOTAL CITATIONS163
AUTHOR COUNT40
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1982
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX7

  • Wellbeing in science education: A qualitative exploration of students’ values

    Julia L Hill, J S Hill et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of Science…2025

    Supporting student wellbeing has become a global priority in schools, yet subject-specific foci on wellbeing are limited. This study addresses this gap by exploring science wellbeing (ScWB) through value fulfilment theory, defining it as the fulfilment of students’ values in science, accompanied by positive feelings (e.g. enjoyment) and functioning (e.g. belonging, engagement). Building on an existing ScWB framework, this qualitative study analys…

  • Beyond beliefs: Multidimensional aspects of religion and spirituality in language

    David B Yaden, Sabina Giorgi et al.ARTICLEPsychology of Religion and…2023

    Religion and spirituality are multidimensional constructs including practices, rituals, and experiences, though they are often treated solely in terms of belief. In this study (N = 2,389), we investigate dimensions examined in previous linguistic analysis studies—religious affiliation and experiences of unity—and new dimensions: religious services, prayer, meditation, and religious/spiritual experience. We replicate previous findings related to t…

  • The Social Science of QAnon: A New Social and Political Phenomenon

    Open AccessMichael K Miller, Joseph M Pierre et al.BOOKThe Social Science of QAnon2023

    QAnon has emerged as the defining conspiracy group of our times, and its far-right conspiracies are extraordinary for their breadth and extremity. Bringing together scholars from psychology, sociology, communications, and political science, this cutting-edge volume uses social science theory to investigate aspects of QAnon. Following an introduction to the 'who, what, and why' of QAnon, Part I focuses on the psychological characteristics of QAnon…

  • Flow Support at Work: Examining the Relationship Between Strengths Use and Flow at Work Among School Staff over a Three-Year Period

    Open AccessCedomir Ignjatovic, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEJournal of Happiness Studies2022

  • Regional personality assessment through social media language

    Open AccessSabina Giorgi, Khoa Le Nguyen et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2022

    OBJECTIVE: We explore the personality of counties as assessed through linguistic patterns on social media. Such studies were previously limited by the cost and feasibility of large-scale surveys; however, language-based computational models applied to large social media datasets now allow for large-scale personality assessment. METHOD: We applied a language-based assessment of the five factor model of personality to 6,064,267 U.S. Twitter users. …

  • Belonging: A review of conceptual issues, an integrative framework, and directions for future research

    Open AccessKelly‐ann Allen, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEAustralian Journal of Psychology2021

    Objective: A sense of belonging – the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences – is a fundamental human need that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes. However, varying perspectives on how belonging should be conceptualised, assessed, and cultivated has hampered much-needed progress on this timely and important topic. To address t…

  • Third wave positive psychology: Broadening towards complexity

    T Lomas, Lea Waters et al.ARTICLEThe Journal of Positive Psychology2021

    The development of academic fields is often described through the metaphor of ‘waves.’ Following the instantiation of positive psychology (the first wave), scholarship emerged looking critically at the notions of positive and negative, becoming known as its second wave. More recently, we discern an equally significant evolution, namely scholarship that in various ways goes beyond the individual and embraces greater complexity. This includes going…

  • The responsibility of knowledge: Identifying and reporting students with evidence of psychological distress in large-scale school-based studies

    Open AccessMaria Lúcia Kern, Helen Cahill et al.ARTICLEResearch Ethics2021

    The use of psychometric tools to investigate the impact of school-based wellbeing programs raises a number of ethical issues around students’ rights, confidentiality and protection. Researchers have explicit ethical obligations to protect participants from potential psychological harms, but guidance is needed for effectively navigating disclosure of identifiable confidential information that indicates signs of psychological distress. Drawing on a…

  • A qualitative exploration of individual differences in wellbeing for highly sensitive individuals

    Open AccessBecky A Black, Maria Lúcia KernARTICLEPalgrave Communications2020

    Cultures explicitly and implicitly create and reinforce social norms and expectations, which impact upon how individuals make sense of and experience their place within that culture. Numerous studies find substantial differences across a range of behavioral and cognitive indices between what have been called “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD)” societies and non-WEIRD cultures. Indeed, lay conceptions and social norms…

  • Strengthening University Student Wellbeing: Language and Perceptions of Chinese International Students

    Open AccessLanxi Huang, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of…2020

    Students at the tertiary education level in Australia are at increased risk of experiencing high levels of psychological distress, with international students at particularly high risk for poor adjustment. As mental health and wellbeing strongly correlate with students' academic performance and general overseas experience, a growing number of studies focus on what universities can do to effectively support students' wellbeing. However, assumption…

  • The language of well-being: Tracking fluctuations in emotion experience through everyday speech

    Open AccessJessie Sun, H Andrew Schwartz et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality and Social…2020Cited by: 5

    The words that people use have been found to reflect stable psychological traits, but less is known about the extent to which everyday fluctuations in spoken language reflect transient psychological states. We explored within-person associations between spoken words and self-reported state emotion among 185 participants who wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR; an unobtrusive audio recording device) and completed experience sampling re…

  • What Schools Need to Know About Fostering School Belonging: A Meta-analysis

    Open AccessKelly Allen, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEEducational Psychology Review2018

  • Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review

    Open AccessGavin R Slemp, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEMotivation and Emotion2018

    Leader autonomy support (LAS) refers to a cluster of supervisory behaviors that are theorized to facilitate self-determined motivation in employees, potentially enabling well-being and performance. We report the results of a meta-analysis of perceived LAS in work settings, drawing from a database of 754 correlations across 72 studies (83 unique samples, N = 32,870). Results showed LAS correlated strongly and positively with autonomous work motiva…

  • The Language of Religious Affiliation: Social, Emotional, and Cognitive Differences

    Open AccessDavid B Yaden, Johannes C Eichstaedt et al.ARTICLESocial Psychological and…2018

    Religious affiliation is an important identifying characteristic for many individuals and relates to numerous life outcomes including health, well-being, policy positions, and cognitive style. Using methods from computational linguistics, we examined language from 12,815 Facebook users in the United States and United Kingdom who indicated their religious affiliation. Religious individuals used more positive emotion words ( β = .278, p

  • Real Men Don’t Say “Cute”: Using Automatic Language Analysis to Isolate Inaccurate Aspects of Stereotypes

    Open AccessJordan Carpenter, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro et al.ARTICLESocial Psychological and…2017

    People associate certain behaviors with certain social groups. These stereotypical beliefs consist of both accurate and inaccurate associations. Using large-scale, data-driven methods with social media as a context, we isolate stereotypes by using verbal expression. Across four social categories—gender, age, education level, and political orientation—we identify words and phrases that lead people to incorrectly guess the social category of the wr…

  • Living in the Past, Present, and Future: Measuring Temporal Orientation With Language

    Open AccessGregory Park, H Andrew Schwartz et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality2017

    Temporal orientation refers to individual differences in the relative emphasis one places on the past, present, or future, and it is related to academic, financial, and health outcomes. We propose and evaluate a method for automatically measuring temporal orientation through language expressed on social media. Judges rated the temporal orientation of 4,302 social media messages. We trained a classifier based on these ratings, which could accurate…

  • Social Networking Sites, Depression, and Anxiety: A Systematic Review

    Open AccessElizabeth M Seabrook, Maria Lúcia Kern et al.ARTICLEJMIR Mental Health2016

  • The Epoch Measure of Adolescent Well-Being.

    Maria Lúcia Kern, Lizbeth Benson et al.ARTICLEPsychological Assessment2016

    We introduce the EPOCH Measure of Adolescent Well-Being, which assesses 5 positive psychological characteristics (Engagement, Perseverance, Optimism, Connectedness, and Happiness) that might foster well-being, physical health, and other positive outcomes in adulthood. To create the measure, a pool of 60 items was compiled, and a series of 10 studies with 4,480 adolescents (age 10-18) from the United States and Australia were used to develop and t…

  • The Perma-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing

    Open AccessJ Corey Butler, Julie Butler et al.ARTICLEInternational Journal of Wellbeing2016

    In the book Flourish (2011), Seligman defined wellbeing in terms of five pillars: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment, or PERMA. We developed the PERMA-Profiler as a brief measure of PERMA. We first compiled hundreds of theoretically relevant items. Three studies (N = 7,188) reduced, tested, and refined items, resulting in a final set of 15 questions (three items per PERMA domain). Eight additional filler item…

  • The language of ineffability: Linguistic analysis of mystical experiences

    David B Yaden, Johannes C Eichstaedt et al.ARTICLEPsychology of Religion and…2016

    Mystical experiences are often described as “ineffable,” or beyond language. However, people readily speak about their mystical experiences if asked about them. How do people describe what is supposedly indescribable? In this study, we used quantitative linguistic analyses to interpret the writings of 777 participants (45.5% female, 51.0% male) who recounted their most significant spiritual or religious experience as part of an online survey. Hig…

  • The Anatomy of Developmental Predictors of Healthy Lives Study (TADPOHLS)

    Maria Lúcia Kern, Margaret L Kern et al.ARTICLEApplied Developmental Science2016

    Numerous studies have followed people across significant portions of their lives. Secondary analyses with these studies offer opportunities to study life trajectories across diverse samples. To aid integrative efforts, we introduce The Anatomy of Developmental Predictors of Healthy Lives Study (TADPOHLS), a data base that categorizes items and constructs from 14 prospective longitudinal studies that followed participants from adolescence into adu…

  • Of Roots and Fruits: A Comparison of Psychedelic and Nonpsychedelic Mystical Experiences

    Open AccessDavid B Yaden, Khoa Le Nguyen et al.ARTICLEJournal of Humanistic Psychology2016Cited by: 14References: 38

    Experiences of profound existential or spiritual significance can be triggered reliably through psychopharmacological means using psychedelic substances. However, little is known about the benefits of religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences (RSMEs) prompted by psychedelic substances, as compared with those that occur through other means. In this study, 739 self-selected participants reported the psychological impact of their RSMEs and indic…

  • A multidimensional approach to measuring well-being in students: Application of the Perma framework

    Maria Lúcia Kern, Lea Waters et al.ARTICLEThe Journal of Positive Psychology2015

    Seligman recently introduced the PERMA model with five core elements of psychological well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. We empirically tested this multidimensional theory with 516 Australian male students (age 13-18). From an extensive well-being assessment, we selected a subset of items theoretically relevant to PERMA. Factor analyses recovered four of the five PERMA elements, and two ill-bein…

  • Psychological Language on Twitter Predicts County-Level Heart Disease Mortality

    Open AccessJohannes C Eichstaedt, Hansen Andrew Schwartz et al.ARTICLEPsychological Science2015

    Hostility and chronic stress are known risk factors for heart disease, but they are costly to assess on a large scale. We used language expressed on Twitter to characterize community-level psychological correlates of age-adjusted mortality from atherosclerotic heart disease (AHD). Language patterns reflecting negative social relationships, disengagement, and negative emotions—especially anger—emerged as risk factors; positive emotions and psychol…

  • Character strengths and academic performance in law students

    Open AccessMaria Lúcia Kern, Margaret L Kern et al.ARTICLEJournal of Research in Personality2015Cited by: 1References: 8