Eranda Jayawickreme
Wake Forest University, USA
Eranda Jayawickreme is the Harold W. Tribble Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Fellow at the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University. He is a personality psychologist whose work focuses on post-traumatic growth, moral personality, personality dynamics, and well-being—research topics that are at the core of existential psychology.
His research has focused on addressing three of the overarching existential questions: 1. How do people experience post-traumatic growth? 2. What does it mean to possess “good character?” and 3. What does it mean to live a life of meaning and purpose? He’s approached those questions in three lines of research. First, in his work studying posttraumatic growth, he’s reconceptualized and examined the phenomenon as positive personality change, rather than retrospective self-perceived growth; he’s advanced cross-disciplinary dialogue about the question of whether there is psychological value in traumatic adversity; and he’s studied the effectiveness of interventions to promote post-traumatic growth. In his second line, he’s studied the nature of “good character;” for example, focusing on moral and intellectual character in daily life and exploring the relationship between moral needs and well-being. And in his third line, he’s examined the experience of finding meaning and purpose—including, for example, the within-person relationship between emotional well-being, cognitive well-being, and meaning in life as well as work identifying culture-specific domains of meaning following traumatic experiences, such as after the civil war in Sri Lanka.
His research has been supported by multiple grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, Templeton World Charity Foundation, European Association for Personality Psychology, and the Asia Foundation/USAID. He has published 3 books and over 100 scholarly publications. His awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from Wake Forest, and the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science. His work has been profiled in the New York Times, the BBC, the Guardian, NPR (including on NPR's Hidden Brain), the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, PBS, and Slate. He is currently co-editor of Social Psychological and Personality Science and an associate editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: PPID.