| A recent shift in the study of psychology, termed positive psychology, has addressed the benefits of building strengths while heightening understanding in the areas of prevention and health promotion. The focus of this study was to incorporate some of the principles of positive psychology into the exploration of the relationship between life events and leadership in children. Explanatory/attributional style and emotional intelligence were investigated as additional predictors of leadership behavior. It was hypothesized that explanatory style and emotional intelligence would predict leadership and moderate the adverse effects of life events.;The subjects were 60 parent and child pairs enrolled in school-aged child care programs/latchkey programs at one of fourteen local suburban schools. Child measures included the Coddington Life Event Scale-Child Version (Coddington, 1972, 1984), the Children's Attributional Style Questionnaire (Seligman et al., 1984), and the Schutte Emotional Intelligence Scale (Schutte et al., 1998). Parent participants completed parent and child consent/assent forms, the Life Event Scale-Parent Report Version (Coddington, 1972, 1984), the Gifted Evaluation Scale-2 Leadership Ability Subscale (GES-2) (McCarney, 1987), and the Scales for Rating Behavioral Characteristics of Superior Students Leadership Characteristics Scale (SRBCSS) (Renzulli, Smith, White, Callahan, & Hartman, 1976).;The dependent variable of leadership was assessed using two measures, the GES-2 and the SRBCSS. The combination of all predictor variables contributed a greater amount of the variance in the SRBCSS measure (R 2 = .29, F (7, 52) = 2.99, p = .01) than in the GES-2 measure (R2 = .22, F (7, 52) = 2.13, p = .06). Emotional intelligence was found to be the strongest predictor and contributed 13% of the variance (partial F (4, 55) = 9.39, p = .003) in the SRBCSS measure. Life events were also found to significantly predict leadership and accounted for 10% of the variance. However, overall attributional style was not found to be significantly related to or predictive of leadership.;These findings suggest that the relationships between the independent/predictor variables and the dependent variable of leadership are complex. Emotional intelligence was found to be more predictive of leadership in children than life events and may serve as a buffer against adverse life events. These findings support the importance of identifying and implementing strength-building strategies in children so that they may be applied by psychologists, teachers, and parents. The increased understanding of the relationships between the constructs of life events, leadership, emotional intelligence and optimistic attributional style lends further support to the benefits of working within the positive psychology framework. |
