Twenge - Generation Me: Revised and Updated Why Todays Young Americans Are More Confident Assertive Entitled: and More Miserable Than Ever Before

AUTHOR PHOTO BY PAM DAVIS

JEAN M. TWENGE is a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of more than 100 scientific-journal articles and book chapters and the books The Impatient Womans Guide to Getting Pregnant and The Narcissism Epidemic (with W. Keith Campbell). Accounts of her research have appeared in the New York Times , USA Today , the Wall Street Journal , Time , and Newsweek , and she has appeared on the Today show, Good Morning America , CBS This Morning , and Dateline NBC . She received a BA and an MA from the University of Chicago in 1993 and a PhD in personality psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1998. After living in Texas, Chicago, Michigan, Minnesota (twice), and Cleveland, she is happy to be settled with her husband and three daughters in beautiful San Diego, California. When not slaving over a hot computer writing something, she can usually be found swimming, reading, sitting in the sun, or reading and sitting in the sunthough usually not swimming while reading and sitting in the sun.

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Praise for Generation Me

Those vague hunches we have about this generationTwenge does a huge, decidedly un-GenX amount of research and replaces them with actual data. Her writing is lucid and entertaining, and shes unafraid to draw bold conclusions when necessary. Its nothing new for a generation to be misunderstood by popular and commercial culture, but the one she describes has been misdrawn to the point of absurdity; refreshing, then, to have someone swap those persistent old myths for thoughtful, careful observations.

Chris Colin, author of What Really Happened to the Class of 93: Start-Ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations through an Untidy Decade

Jean Twenge is not only dedicated as a researcher and social scientist, but she is clearly passionate about it. In this forward-thinking and clear-eyed book, she immediately stands out as a social critic of substance, in a world of dogmatic and chattering media pundits who are only guessing when they are covering major social trends and generational changes.

Paula Kamen, author of Feminist Fatale and Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution

Everyone knows that American society is changing, but no one until now has documented how the people themselves are changing. In this startling, witty, and refreshing book, a pioneering researcher explains how the very personality of the average American is different. An upbringing that featured forming rather than meeting high expectations, and feeling good before doing good, has resulted in a generation with the highest self-esteem on recordand the highest rates of depression. Based on careful, groundbreaking research but filled with touching and amusing stories, this book explains exactly how the American character is changing and evolving, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. Americans should read this book and ponder whether we should raise the next generation on unrealistic hopes, undisciplined self-assertion, and endless, baseless self-congratulation.

Roy F. Baumeister, author of The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life , and Eppes Eminent Professor of Psychology, Florida State University

Dr. Jean Twenge provides an insightful analysis of the young adults she labels GenMetheir supreme self-confidence in their own worth, their concern with doing things their way, and the benefits and costs that come from their focus on themselves. Twenge draws upon her outstanding research to describe generational differences and their sources, lending an authority to her analysis that few previous commentators on GenMe have enjoyed.

Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, PhD, Yale University professor and author of Women Who Think Too Much

Jean Twenge has the intelligence and courage to voice a concern that is in the minds of all todays parents. If you want your child to succeed in todays world, read this book.

Mona Lisa Schulz, MD, PhD, author of The New Feminine Brain

Twenges book is comprehensive... filled with statistics and thoughtful observations about the group shes dubbed Generation Me... accessible and a must-read.

Booklist

[The] book is livened with analysis of films, magazines and TV shows, and with anecdotal stories from her life and others. The real basis of her argument, however, lies in her 14 years of research comparing the results of personality tests given to boomers when they were under 30 and those given to GenMeers today.... Many of her findings are fascinating. And her call to ditch the self-esteem movement in favor of education programs that encourage empathy and real accomplishment could spare some Meers from the depression that often occurs when they hit the realities of todays increasingly competitive workplace.

Publishers Weekly

Twenge tells an engaging story, fueled and supported by a solid base of data, illustrative quotes from her and others research, and barometric examples from TV shows, movies, comics, and advertisements.... Throughout the book, her analyses of myriad topics articulated a number of ideas on the tip of my minds tongue.

AARP the Magazine

This book should be required reading for parents-to-be.

The Washington Post

ALSO BY JEAN M. TWENGE

The Impatient Womans Guide to Getting Pregnant

The Narcissism Epidemic (coauthor)

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Copyright 2006, 2014 by Jean M. Twenge, PhD

The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources to reprint material in their control: Universal Syndicate for Calvin and Hobbes 1992 by Bill Watterson. Dist. by Universal Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved: 76, 197; Doonesbury 1993 G. B. Trudeau. Reprinted with permission of Universal Press Syndicate. All rights reserved: 8283.

Note to readers: The names of some of the people quoted in this book have been changed. In some cases, persons described are composites.

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First Atria Paperback edition September 2014

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