Anyone who’s taken an introduction to psychology course has probably been overwhelmed by the variety of mental illnesses that can affect the human psyche. Even a superficial study of these afflictions often leaves students no time to learn about positive human functioning. But areas like creativity, resilience, and responsibility are intrinsic to optimizing life experience – and are just a sample of what’s studied in the School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences’ (SBOS) program in positive psychology. For instance, Assistant Professor Jeanne Nakamura recently finished a research project on mentoring and the transmission of excellence and responsibility.

In June 2009 Nakamura, along with coauthors David J. Shernoff and Charles H. Hooker, will be publishing Good Mentoring: Fostering Excellent Practice in Higher Education, an in-depth analysis of their research: the way mentors transmit their knowledge, skills, and the guiding values that support good work and social responsibility.

Nakamura, who is also the codirector of SBOS’ Quality of Life Research Center, has been at CGU since 1999, but joined the SBOS faculty in 2007 to help the school incorporate positive psychology into its psychology program. Her background is in lifespan developmental psychology, including the GoodWork Project, a 10-year collaborative study with Harvard University and Stanford University researchers examining the nature and conditions of good work (work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningful to its practitioners), and analyzing how individuals and institutions might perpetuate good work on a wider scale.

Nakamura’s involvement with the GoodWork Project inspired her current research on the making of good mentors, which she is conducting with SBOS students Orin Davis, Ia Ko, Michelle Mason, Roeuny Ros, and School of Educational Studies student Shamini Dias.

In the recently completed research, “We were very interested in what happens to good work across generations, so we developed an approach that’s a little unusual in studies of mentoring and its impact,” said Nakamura. “Most research looks at individual mentors, or individual protégés, and asks them to reflect on what the experience meant to them. In our case, we were looking to study what we call lineages.”

This involved the questions of whether and how senior members of a profession pass on their habits of good work to the young professionals who work with them, and whether these young people go on to transmit what they have learned to later generations.

Nakamura and her team interviewed leading scientists who exemplified good work. Then, they interviewed the scientists’ former students, and those students’ students. What did they find?

The lineages shared certain values, such as commitments to scientific honesty and integrity. Each lineage was also distinguished from the others by a handful of signature values and practices; there are different ways of doing good work. In addition, “there were a number of things we were surprised by,” said Nakamura. “One was the extent to which these scientists were able to create communities within their laboratories, so that these labs served as extensions of their own mentoring. So in addition to individual interactions, there was a large role played by the community that the mentor created.”

One of the practical implications of this is the importance of the fit between students and labs or research groups. So if there is a lab that is quiet and harmonious, extroverted students might find working there stifling. If a lab is aggressively interactive, more reserved students could feel intimidated and unhappy.

More generally, “For mentors and students, there’s often the tendency to look for the most eminent person in a field to work with,” noted Nakamura. “And our research suggested that other factors that relate to good work are really important, too.”

Nakamura observes that there is little training or thought currently devoted to good mentoring in graduate education. That is why there is value in institutional support for mentoring, including increased discussions about the importance of mentoring, and what it means to mentor well.

As she pointed out, research on good mentoring is both expanding the field of positive psychology and reinforcing its themes of social ties and positive development. “I think one thing clearly illustrated in this study is the importance of formative experiences into adulthood. We know that social support is important throughout life, but also that people continue to be affected and changed and shaped by their interactions as adults.”