Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Global-community psychology is a meta-psychology concerned with understanding, assessing, and addressing individual and collective psychological consequences of global events by encouraging multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multinational knowledge, methods, and interventions (Marsella, 1998). The main tenets of the theory will be elaborated and the strengths and limitations will be presented.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Psychology is a vast and ever changing field that has generated a variety of paradigms, specialties and subspecialties that continue to be under-tapped by scholars in international studies. For example, my subspecialty in the psychology of traumatic stress can be used to generate original ideas, models and practical applications for addressing problems in international relations. We can ask questions at the level of understanding the views of individual leaders that affect international relations, e.g., to consider the influence that a childhood experience of a church bombing in Birmingham Alabama may have had on the foreign policy views of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Alternatively, we can ask questions at a larger societal level about the effects of trauma, e.g., the relationships between perceived threat, fear, and foreign policy views in the American public after the September 11 2001 terrorism attacks. We can also turn around the question and create and test models linking structural and other variables at the international level to incidents of torture and other types of political violence and their psychological consequences. Although such investigations appear promising, those that exist are in their infancy.

Publication Type: Paper (prepared oral presentation)
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Over the past decades the discipline of political marketing has gained considerable credibility and support. Theories and interpretations of political marketing are nevertheless still overshadowed by numerous discussions and presumed contradictions (Newman, 1999; O’Shaugnessy, 2002). Most of these discussions can simply be narrowed down to the encountered problems facing each multidisciplinary research domain. The domain of political psychology has come a long way and has seemingly succeeded in embracing differences between political and psychological approaches (Huddy, 2004). Moreover the field of political psychology has succeeded in turning the multidisciplinary approach into an indispensable asset.

When comparing political psychology to political marketing several differences and similarities can be unveiled. The most prominent difference between the two disciplines is undeniably the final destination of both disciplines. Political psychology strives to understand and unravel certain political behavior by applying insights from psychology, whereas political marketing introduces marketing principles into the political arena aiming at optimizing candidate and party potentials. In other words, political psychology has a cognitive-explaining approach in contrast to the cognitive-instrumental approach of political marketing. Many similarities can nonetheless be detected as well, such as the multidisciplinary and behavioristical approach of both disciplines.

This paper will strive to combine and apply the lessons learned by political psychology to the support and further development of the struggling field of political marketing theory. The emphasis on understanding, explaining, and predicting aspects of political behavior driven by psychological processes such as image, personality, and emotion can only strengthen political marketing theory. Within the framework of this paper, theories, interpretations, and examples - retrieved from both scientific domains - will be critically contrasted and discussed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Psychology’s explosive growth in the postwar period has been well documented, as has the concurrent expansion of psychological ideas, language, and worldviews into the broader American culture, leading to what prominent theorists have called a “therapeutic culture.” It is clear that the concepts and practices of psychology have become an essential part of the fabric of modern American society. But which “American society” has psychology become such an integral part of? In the wake of earlier work critiquing psychology’s blind acceptance of racial and gender norms, recent scholars have begun to analyze how psychology reflects and reinforces the worldview of the middle and upper classes.
If psychology has unthinkingly promoted middle-class values, self presentations, and ways of being as “normal,” how do members of the working classes perceive a psychology that frames them as non-normative? This paper explores that question by examining how a particular working-class medium did navigate ideas of psychology in the postwar period. Men’s adventure magazines, known in the trade as “armpit slicks,” “men’s sweat magazines,” or “the sweats,” were widely popular in the 1950s. Aimed at working-class white men, sweats were the direct descendants of the earlier pulps, though printed in a larger format and on more expensive paper to appeal to the newly affluent average Joe. Between their heyday in the 1950s and their swan song in the 1970s, more than 100 titles, such as Real, True, Bold Men, and Rugged, regaled readers with tales of danger and heroism. In addition, they, like mainstream American periodicals, wrote about the “new” phenomenon of psychology. But while Newsweek advocated “fine tuning” one’s emotions and Life declared the 1950s the “Age of Psychology,” the sweats took a different approach.
Psychology in the sweats was often used to camouflage sexually titillating pieces such as “The TRUE Story of the Most Widespread Female Abnormality: Are Nymphomaniacs Normal?” with a veneer of scientific legitimacy, mocking the perceived pretensions of psychology and intellectualism in the process. But some articles hinted at readers’ fears as well as their fantasies. Normalcy was a recurring theme (“Self Test: How Normal Are Your Sex Needs?” is typical), but so were darker fears, as evidenced by “A Story Every Man Should Read: Are You Afraid of Sex?” and “Castration: Man’s Greatest Fear.” Homosexuality was also a surprisingly frequent trope. Other recurring themes suggest anxieties over gender roles (“The American Male Is No Longer a Man Says a Woman Psychologist”), professionalization, and status. At the same time, the sweats valorized working-class ways of thinking, feeling, and perceiving in contrast to those of psychological professionals, who were often portrayed as unnatural or inauthentic.
Relying on close readings and rhetorical analyses of the substantial collection of men’s adventure magazines at Michigan State University, and using Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents and Erin Smith's Hard-Boiled as methodological models, this paper teases out not only how working-class readers made sense of the world through the sweats, but also how they made sense of—and use of—the increasingly ubiquitous norms of psychology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Past efforts to conceptualize the mental health of African American women have applied traditional mental health models a priori to this and other minority groups; often leading to inconsistent and inconclusive findings related to mental health components and processes. Such research has mainly focused on defining and testing for mental health using an objective set of measures and conceptual definitions of mental health that have failed to consider both structural and individual variables, as well as mental health processes that directly influence mental health. In-depth interviews with 20 African American women identified as having mental health in three U.S. metropolitan cities show that mental health is an active pursuit that is supported through the use of a deconstructive/reconstructive process, in addition to other coping mechanisms. Deconstruction is an interpretive process that involves recognizing and externalizing factors affecting one’s mental health and is shaped by one’s relative position to her social environment. Participants use the deconstructive process to identify four early childhood socialization practices and three factors shaping their adulthood that negatively impact their mental functioning. I argue that deconstruction alone is insufficient to maintaining a healthy state of mind. Reconstruction, or the ability to transform potential mental health threats into effective counterstrategies is a significant mental health process; this research discusses four counterstrategies used by participants. Reconstruction strategies depend on one’s race, gender, sexuality, religious beliefs/practices, mothering and marital status, age and available coping resources.