Institute  of Personality, Assessment and Counselling

The institute comprises eight professors:

• Marine Chitashvili
• Luiza Arutinov
• Khatuna Martskvishvili
• Maia Mestvirishvili
• Lili Khechuashvili
• Teona Lodia
• Mariam Panjikidze
• Ketevan Mosashvili

The institute aims at creating research-based courses about the diversity of human behavior in a personal and social context, investigating interpersonal and intrapersonal variables and applying theoretical ideas and outcomes to practice and social innovations.

The institute achieves its goals by:

• Teaching basic theories, the methodology and classical studies in personality psychology, which is best done through assessment and revision, testing and applying new ideas to the practice.
• Teaching diverse methodologies along with traditional laboratory experiment methods. These methodologies include different interviewing techniques, computer simulations, case study, narrative techniques, discourse analysis, etc.
• Improving transferable skills among students and spreading awareness on how the existing context is used for testing theory-based ideas.

Professors focus on studying personal processes and interpersonal influences to understand human behavior. We believe that a person's behavior analysis is possible through examining intrapersonal processes and the influence of social relationships.

Within institute programs, students study general psychological theories of personality, research methods, history, and contemporary literature. They are involved in research activities with professors. Based on their own research interests they can choose courses from other branches of psychology and from the broad spectrum of the social sciences.

The institute offers Masters and Doctoral programs and psychological counselling center for students:

• Master’s program - Child and adolescents' psychological assessment and counselling.
• Doctoral program - Positive psychology - empirical studies
• Psychological counselling center for students.

Institute research interests encompass following topics:

• Psychological and subjective well-being.
• Stress, trauma, coping strategies, post-traumatic growth and ambiguous loss.
• Emotional and social intelligence.
• Moral judgment, moral identity and moral competence.
• Visual analysis - psychological perspective.
• Aversive personality traits - dark triad and its correlates.
• Creativity.
• Flow.
• Personal and social identities - process of forming, dynamics.
• Generativity and its correlates.
• Psychology of Religion – development of beliefs, values and study of affecting factors in the framework of meaning making.
• Role of positive parenting in mental health of children and adolescents.
• Psychoanalysis: Theory, Method, Application.
• Psychoanalysis: Culture, Gender, Political Psychology.
• Efficacy of evidence-based psychotherapy in anxiety, affective, and personality disorders.
• Family functioning, social support and mental health.
• Cognitive errors and psychological disorders.
• Development and adaptation of child and adolescents' psychological assessment and research methods.
• The study and assessment of risk-factors, genesis and epidemiology of behavioral and emotional problems in children and adolescents.  Research and development of therapeutic approaches.
• The study of psychosocial factors of adolescents' deviant behavior; Development of prevention and intervention programs for educational institutes and juvenile justice system.
• Developing the role of psychologists working in the field of Juvenile Justice - Creating and improving child friendly investigative interviewing techniques and forensic psychological assessment tools tailored to the best interest and developmental patterns of the child.
• Counseling adolescents with cognitive-behavioral and problem focused approach.
• Assessment, prevention and intervention adolescents' emotional and behavioral problems in a school context.
• Developing and implementing preventive/intervention programs regarding parent-children relationship difficulties.
• Developing and implementing anti-drug preventive programs for adolescents.