Threat Management: Clinical and Social Psychological Approaches

Catalog description

How do people manage the consequences of life's anticipated and realized misfortunes? Put less formally, how do people deal with the threat of negative experiences? Humans possess myriad strategies and natural tendencies that allow us to navigate threat and uncertainty, cope in the face of threat, and bounce back from negative events. The research on these self-protective mechanisms will be the topic of this seminar. More specifically, the first third of the course will cover threat management strategies for potential threats, the second third will cover threat management in the face of a misfortunate (during threat), and the last third will cover strategies following a threat. Some topics of interest include: risk perception, information avoidance, uncertainty navigation, defensive pessimism, self-handicapping, bad news delivery and responding, crisis management, psychophysiological reactions to social evaluative threat, immune neglect, emotion regulation, and social comparison, prosociality after trauma, counterfactual thinking, and denial / acceptance.