Well-Being and Resilience International Workshop

Judith Smetana is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester. She received her B. A. at the University of California, Berkeley, her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan. Dr. Smetana's research focuses on children’s moral and social-cognitive development and on adolescent-parent relationships and parenting beliefs and practices in different ethnic/racial and cultural contexts. She has published extensively on these topics and is the author of Adolescents, Families, and Social Development: How Teens Construct their World. Dr. Smetana has received several awards for her research, including the Robert B. Cairns Award in 2016 from the Carolina Consortium on Human Development, the John P. Hill Memorial Career Award in 2018 from the Society for Research on Adolescence, and the Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Science award in 2023 from the Jean Piaget Society. She served as Associate Editor of the journal Child Development and as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Child Development Perspectives from 2017 to 2023. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Avi Assor is Professor Emeritus of Educational and School Psychology at Ben Gurion University (BGU), Israel. His research focuses on socializing processes affecting children's autonomous internalization of values and autonomous motivation. Within this general domain, he focuses on the harms of conditional parental regard, and the benefits of teachers' and parents' support for youth development of the sense of having an authentic inner compass, based on authentic values, aspirations, personal preferences and goals. Recently, he has been focusing on the benefits of the needs for freedom and authentic inner compass as two essential components of the meta-need for autonomy. Other recent projects involve the development of a model of socio-emotional learning based on SDT, and the development of a video- and simulation- based program to enhance educators’ capacity to support students’ basic needs and autonomous value internalization. He has published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Educational Psychology.

Athanasios Mouratidis received his PhD from the Catholic University of Leuven in 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Athens. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University, following previous academic positions at TED University and Hacettepe University. His research primarily explores motivation in various achievement and applied settings, including education, sports, and family dynamics. He is particularly interested in how social contexts and personal characteristics shape individuals' motivation, subsequently influencing their functioning and well-being. His work has been published in numerous international peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Mouratidis is an Associate Editor for Learning and Individual Differences and Educational Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of various SSCI-indexed journals. He has been awarded two three-year TUBITAK 1001 grants to investigate the effects of social comparisons and the role of motivation, classroom environment, and family dynamics in adolescents' academic success and well-being