How can we promote the mental health of adolescents? Although there have been decades of work focusing on eliminating or reducing psychological problems in children and adolescents through psychopathology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry, isn't the ultimate goal for children to be safe, healthy, happy, moral, and fully engaged in life?

The papers in this special issue of "The ANNALS" depart from the tradition of a disease-based model, where well-being is defined by the absence of distress and disorder. Although the authors recognize that decreasing negative aspects is an important step in promoting health among children and teens, they challenge the conventional approaches and call for increased attention to the positive aspect of human development.

The articles in this issue are an important addition to the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands' call for an Adolescent Mental Health Initiative, which was a series of conferences in 2003 at the University of Pennsylvania. This further one commission, led by Martin Seligman, was created to address positive youth development and its relevance to adolescent mental health.

Providing a dramatic shift in perspective, these papers include innovative research topics and offer a solid framework for the idea of positive youth development including the history of positive youth development, highlights of effective positive youth programs, evaluation studies of a variety of interventions, examples of theory-based interventions, and more.

Scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers in the child and adolescent field will find this issue of "The ANNALS" a critical resource. It offers a refreshing position that emphasizes positive human development and strives toward the vision of young people who are satisfied with their life, who have identified their talents and use them in a variety of fulfilling pursuits, and who are contributing members of our society.

On February 18th, 2009, Sean Delonas published a controversial cartoon in the New York Post depicting two policemen shooting and killing a monkey with the caption: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." On the adjoining page was a photo of President Barack Obama signing this very piece of legislation into law. Although public debate over the cartoon has centered entirely on its potentially racist overtones, we might ask from a Darwinian perspective how the stereotype of the black ape works to disavow a universally shared human apehood. How might we comprehend animality in non-pejorative terms? Whereas in contemporary race and sexuality studies the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible, Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians such as Senator Rick Santorum equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J.M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. Insofar as humanizing the abject only vacates the structurally empty and infinitely transposable position of "the animal," he argues that all forms of belonging-no matter how open and hospitable they are toward others-inevitably produce "beasts" whose exclusion contradicts our apparent desire for nonviolence. While one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable-even if ultimately unattainable-ideals, Bestial Traces shows that by maintaining such principles we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence precisely by failing to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

The psychological syndrome of learned helplessness is a uniquely modern phenomenon, and has been applied to a variety of human problems such as inappropriate passivity or demoralization. The best-known application of learned helplessness has been an explanation of depression, although numerous other extensions have been made, most recently to physical illness and death. This timely and valuable work examines learned helplessness with reference to contemporary culture of individuality and personal control.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of what goes right in life, from birth to death and at all stops in between. It is a newly-christened approach within psychology that takes seriously the examination of that which makes life most worth living. Everyone's life has peaks and valleys, and positive psychology does not deny the valleys. Its signature premise is more nuanced, but nonetheless important: what is good about life is as genuine as what is bad and, therefore, deserves equal attention from psychologists. Positive psychology as an explicit perspective has existed only since 1998, but enough relevant theory and research now exist to fill a textbook suitable for a semester-long college course.
A Primer in Positive Psychology is thoroughly grounded in scientific research and covers major topics of concern to the field: positive experiences such as pleasure and flow; positive traits such as character strengths, values, and talents; and the social institutions that enable these subjects as well as what recent research might contribute to this knowledge. Every chapter contains exercises that illustrate positive psychology, a glossary, suggestions of articles and books for further reading, and lists of films, websites, and popular songs that embody chapter themes.
A comprehensive overview of positive psychology by one of the acknowledged leaders in the field, this textbook provides students with a thorough introduction to an important area of psychology.

The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters," Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies.
Probing Derrida's notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson's concept of "social death," Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt's The" Conjure Woman," Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison's Beloved" against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one's kin as property. Using William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage.
Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead "others" can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations.
Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

How can we promote the mental health of adolescents? Although there have been decades of work focusing on eliminating or reducing psychological problems in children and adolescents through psychopathology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry, isn't the ultimate goal for children to be safe, healthy, happy, moral, and fully engaged in life?

The papers in this special issue of "The ANNALS" depart from the tradition of a disease-based model, where well-being is defined by the absence of distress and disorder. Although the authors recognize that decreasing negative aspects is an important step in promoting health among children and teens, they challenge the conventional approaches and call for increased attention to the positive aspect of human development.

The articles in this issue are an important addition to the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands' call for an Adolescent Mental Health Initiative, which was a series of conferences in 2003 at the University of Pennsylvania. This further one commission, led by Martin Seligman, was created to address positive youth development and its relevance to adolescent mental health.

Providing a dramatic shift in perspective, these papers include innovative research topics and offer a solid framework for the idea of positive youth development including the history of positive youth development, highlights of effective positive youth programs, evaluation studies of a variety of interventions, examples of theory-based interventions, and more.

Scholars, students, practitioners, and policymakers in the child and adolescent field will find this issue of "The ANNALS" a critical resource. It offers a refreshing position that emphasizes positive human development and strives toward the vision of young people who are satisfied with their life, who have identified their talents and use them in a variety of fulfilling pursuits, and who are contributing members of our society.

"Character" has become a front-and-center topic in contemporary discourse, but this term does not have a fixed meaning. Character may be simply defined by what someone does not do, but a more active and thorough definition is necessary, one that addresses certain vital questions. Is character a singular characteristic of an individual, or is it composed of different aspects? Does character--however we define it--exist in degrees, or is it simply something one happens to have? How can character be developed? Can it be learned? Relatedly, can it be taught, and who might be the most effective teacher? What roles are played by family, schools, the media, religion, and the larger culture? This groundbreaking handbook of character strengths and virtues is the first progress report from a prestigious group of researchers who have undertaken the systematic classification and measurement of widely valued positive traits. They approach good character in terms of separate strengths-authenticity, persistence, kindness, gratitude, hope, humor, and so on-each of which exists in degrees.
Character Strengths and Virtues classifies twenty-four specific strengths under six broad virtues that consistently emerge across history and culture: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Each strength is thoroughly examined in its own chapter, with special attention to its meaning, explanation, measurement, causes, correlates, consequences, and development across the life span, as well as to strategies for its deliberate cultivation. This book demands the attention of anyone interested in psychology and what it can teach about the good life.