The primary purpose of this study was to determine the effect of state extraversion on different types of affect. Ninety six participants were instructed to be extraverted or introverted in a 10‐minute dyadic discussion. State extraversion had a strong effect on positive affect and smaller (but still strong) effects on pleasant and activated affect, with these latter two effects almost equal in magnitude. This pattern of findings appears to increase confidence that the effect of state extraversion is genuine rather than the result of construct overlap, in that extraversion's effect on positive affect is not dominated by its effect on activated affect. No support for reward sensitivity as a potential explanatory mechanism was found. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article reports results of a content analysis of 18 teaching assistant (TA) manuals. Topics were divided into four major categories of tasks: professional socialization, intellectual, interpersonal, and organizational. Twenty-six of the 103 topics identified were included in more than 50% of the manuals. Among the common topics, more topics were included from the categories dealing with intellectual and interpersonal tasks than from the other two categories, highlighting the importance of these two dimensions of effective teaching, which is consistent with Lowman's (1984) theoretical model. The topic outline provided by our study could serve as a model for TA manuals.

To honor exemplary teachers, we need to ask whether there are universal qualities of effective teachers that we can agree upon as a community.

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The Inventory of Family Feelings (IFF), a self-administered measure of interpersonal affect, maps a family's affective structure showing patterns of conflicted relationships and alliances. Three studies demonstrate that IFF scores have high reliability, construct and concurrent validity, and potential utility in family research. Families with identified patients and couples in marital therapy score less positively toward each other than control families, most of the negative affect in such families centers on and emanates from the identified patients, IFF scores are positively correlated with ratings of affect based on audio recordings of marital interaction and with Locke Wallace Short Marital Adjustment Test scores, and IFF scores and MMPI pathology indicies are negatively correlated.