Christopher Peterson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3582489 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christopher Peterson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christopher |
| FAMILY NAME | Peterson |
| SIGNATURE | PETERSON C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1697-5702 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 88 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 985 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 88 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Tiered manufacturing of pharmaceuticals as a commercial determinant of health: Implications for medicine quality and equity
Tiered manufacturing, the practice of adapting different levels of pharmaceutical production standards to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) versus high-income countries, has not been investigated as a commercial determinant of health (CDoH), defined by the World Health Organization as a private sector activity affecting public health. This paper examines this practice and its implications for medicine quality, universal health coverage, an…
Brand babel®
University brands aim to differentiate institutions of higher learning. Yet brands are beset by a fundamental paradox according to which their stated uniqueness and difference conflicts with their desire for stable meaning. Brand consistency in this regard recalls the invariability that Edmund Husserl associates with ideal objects, especially geometric abstractions. As with the perfect circle or triangle, univocity of expression is the essence of…
The Beekeeper's Ghost: Democracy and Transsovereignty in Zanny Begg's The Beehive
Posthumanism s
On the Genesis of Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism
The Plasticity of Race: Microaggressions and Derridean Postracism
This essay explores Jacques Derrida’s nonteleological conception of postracism, which he elucidated in his unpublished response to Ètienne Balibar’s keynote address at the tRACEs conference held at UC Irvine in 2003. Racism, for Derrida, is intrinsically “plastic,” which predisposes it to future metonymic forms even if racism stricto sensu were to end. Building on his observations, I argue that these metonymies also extend historically backward. …
Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism
According to scholars of the nonhuman turn, the scandal of theory lies in its failure to decenter the human. The real scandal, however, is that we keep trying.The human has become a conspicuous blind spot for many theorists seeking to extend hospitality to animals, plants, and even insentient things. The displacement of the human is essential and urgent, yet given the humanist presumption that animals lack a number of allegedly unique human capac…
Monkey Trouble
The human is a source of trouble for posthumanism.Committed to disturbing the opposition between human and nonhuman, posthumanist theory has tended to sideline the human from the scene of its theoretical engagements with otherness.The human has become akin to the "Invisible Gorilla" made famous by psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.Seeking to establish the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, Chabris and Simons instructed parti…
The home of Friday: Coetzee'sFoe
In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton struggles to give voice to Friday based on Cruso’s claim that Friday cannot speak by force of a cruel slave master having cut out his tongue. Susan develops an absolute aversion to his mouth and refuses to look inside it, which means that she never verifies that he is lacking a tongue. We therefore cannot rule out the possibility that his silence may be wilfully performed rather than oppressively imposed. This essay…
Life Satisfaction and Frequency of Doctor Visits
OBJECTIVE: Identifying positive psychological factors that reduce health care use may lead to innovative efforts that help build a more sustainable and high-quality health care system. Prospective studies indicate that life satisfaction is associated with good health behaviors, enhanced health, and longer life, but little information about the association between life satisfaction and health care use is available. We tested whether higher life sa…
The Monolingualism of the Human
The Monolingualism of the Human Christopher Peterson (bio) In The Beast and The Sovereign Volume 2, a collection of ten lectures focused on the “odd couple” of Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe, Jacques Derrida devotes a substantial portion of his second lecture to one of the most well-known scenes in Defoe’s novel: Robinson’s discovery of “the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore” (Derrida 31, Defoe 162). Having lived alone on his island for fif…
Assessing psychological well-being: Self-report instruments for the NIH Toolbox
Normal Monsters and Monstrous Monstrosities: A response to cary wolfe
Cary Wolfe's response to “The Posthumanism to Come” revolves primarily around two central contentions: (1) that my article draws upon a number of Derridean principles to which Wolfe is equally and
Perceived neighborhood social cohesion and stroke
Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all se…
Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality
On February 18th, 2009, Sean Delonas published a controversial cartoon in the New York Post depicting two policemen shooting and killing a monkey with the caption: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill." On the adjoining page was a photo of President Barack Obama signing this very piece of legislation into law. Although public debate over the cartoon has centered entirely on its potentially racist overtones, we might …
Character strengths predict subjective well-being during adolescence
Previous research indicates that several character strengths (e.g., gratitude, optimism, persistence, and self-regulation) correlate positively with measures of subjective well-being in adolescents. We examined whether character strengths predict future well-being. Adolescent high school students (N = 149) completed the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths for Youth and measures of subjective well-being (depression, happiness, life satisfactio…
Assessment for the U.S. Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program: The Global Assessment Tool
Psychology and the U.S. military have a long history of collaboration. The U.S. Army Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) program aims to measure the psychosocial strengths and assets of soldiers as well as their problems, to identify those in need of basic training in a given domain as well as those who would benefit from advanced training, and then to provide that training. The goals of the CSF program include the promotion of well-being as well…
Mental Health Promotion in Public Health: Perspectives and Strategies From Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is the study of what is “right” about people—their positive attributes, psychological assets, and strengths. Its aim is to understand and foster the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to thrive. Cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal research demonstrates that positive emotions are associated with numerous benefits related to health, work, family, and economic status. Growing biomedical researc…
Slavery's Bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus Tales
The critical reception of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus Tales has often interpreted these animal fables as allegories of American slavery. Such an approach, however, risks what Steve Baker calls the 'denial of the animal', which displaces animal signifiers onto human signifieds. Through readings of 'The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story' and 'How the Birds Talk', I ask what it might mean to take seriously the numerous historical, political and philos…
The Posthumanism to Come
This essay aims to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term “posthumanism” itself. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to render the face of the human unknowable to itself,…
When is the Search for Meaning Related to Life Satisfaction?
Life meaning is important for psychological and physical health and well‐being. Researchers have only recently looked at the presence of life meaning and the search for life meaning as separate constructs. In the current study, 731 adult respondents from the United States completed the Meaning in Life Questionnaire, which separately assesses the presence of meaning and the search for meaning, and measures of well‐being. Presence and search for li…
Is optimal functioning a distinct state
Many languages and cultures have labels for individuals who have achieved a superior state of functioning, sometimes referred to as enlightenment or wisdom. This conceptualization of optimal functioning as a distinct state is implicit to several well-known psychological models, as well. This study evaluated whether self-reported strengths of character revealed evidence of such a state. A sample of 83,576 US residents completed the Values in Actio…
Important Papers on Well-Being: Assessment, Science, and Culture
Does it matter where we live: The urban psychology of character strengths
Psychology has neglected the study of variation across cities. An urban psychology is needed that takes seriously such variation and focuses on strengths and assets contributing to the good life as much as on problems of urbanization. To illustrate the value of an urban psychology, we describe studies of character strengths among residents in the 50 largest U.S. cities (N = 47,369). Differences in character strengths were found to exist across ci…
Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions
Positive psychology has flourished in the last 5 years. The authors review recent developments in the field, including books, meetings, courses, and conferences. They also discuss the newly created classification of character strengths and virtues, a positive complement to the various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (e. g., American Psychiatric Association, 1994), and present some cross-cultural findings that…
Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals
The importance of intellectual talent to achievement in all professional domains is well established, but less is known about other individual differences that predict success. The authors tested the importance of 1 noncognitive trait: grit. Defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, grit accounted for an average of 4% of the variance in success outcomes, including educational attainment among 2 samples of adults (N=1,545 and N=690)…
The future of optimism
Shared Virtue: The Convergence of Valued Human Strengths across Culture and History
Positive psychology needs an agreed-upon way of classifying positive traits as a backbone for research, diagnosis, and intervention. As a 1st step toward classification, the authors examined philosophical and religious traditions in China (Confucianism and Taoism), South Asia (Buddhism and Hinduism), and the West (Athenian philosophy, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) for the answers each provided to questions of moral behavior and the good life.…
Pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for physical illness: A thirty-five-year longitudinal study
Explanatory style, the habitual ways in which individuals explain bad events, was extracted from open-ended questionnaires filled out by 99 graduates of the Harvard University classes of 1942-1944 at age 25. Physical health from ages 30 to 60 as measured by physician examination was related to earlier explanatory style. Pessimistic explanatory style (the belief that bad events are caused by stable, global, and internal factors) predicted poor hea…
Perceived neighborhood social cohesion and stroke
Three Ways to Be Happy: Pleasure, Engagement, and Meaning-Findings from Australian and US Samples
Zest and work
Zest is a positive trait reflecting a person's approach to life with anticipation, energy, and excitement. In the present study, 9803 currently employed adult respondents to an Internet site completed measures of dispositional zest, orientation to work as a calling, and satisfaction with work and life in general. Across all occupations, zest predicted the stance that work was a calling ( r = .39), as well as work satisfaction ( r = .46) and gener…
Personal control and health promotion
Does it matter where we live: The urban psychology of character strengths
Psychology has neglected the study of variation across cities. An urban psychology is needed that takes seriously such variation and focuses on strengths and assets contributing to the good life as much as on problems of urbanization. To illustrate the value of an urban psychology, we describe studies of character strengths among residents in the 50 largest U.S. cities (N = 47,369). Differences in character strengths were found to exist across ci…
Learned Helplessness and Victimization
The learned helplessness phenomenon is proposed as a model for the emotional numbing and maladaptive passivity sometimes following victimization. Victims may learn during the victimization episode that responding is futile. This learning is represented as an expectation of future response‐outcome independence (helplessness). Causal interpretations of the episode affect the chronicity and generality of deficits resulting from this expectation, as …
Character strengths in organizations
Character refers to qualities within individuals that lead them to desire and to pursue the good. We propose that strengths of character are a neglected but critically important resource for organizations. Character matters because it leads people to do the right thing, and the right thing can be productive and profitable. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Research: The Effect of Religious-Spiritual Coping on Positive Attitudes of Adult Muslim Refugees From Kosovo and Bosnia
(2003). RESEARCH: The Effect of Religious-Spiritual Coping on Positive Attitudes of Adult Muslim Refugees From Kosovo and Bosnia. The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 29-47
Gender differences in best friendships
Explanatory style and academic performance among university freshman
Mental Health Promotion in Public Health: Perspectives and Strategies From Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is the study of what is “right” about people—their positive attributes, psychological assets, and strengths. Its aim is to understand and foster the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to thrive. Cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal research demonstrates that positive emotions are associated with numerous benefits related to health, work, family, and economic status. Growing biomedical researc…
Faith-based and Secular Pathways to Hope and Optimism Subconstructs in Middle-aged and Older Cardiac Patients
This study was designed to fill gaps in the new field of positive psychology. Using data from two sequential interviews, this study examined the effect of faith-based and secular pathways to hope and optimism among 226 middle-aged and older patients facing a major medical crisis-cardiac surgery. Structural equation modeling demonstrated that religious faith factors contributed to the agency component of hope and dispositional optimism indirectly …
Attributional style and the generality of learned helplessness
According to the logic of the attribution reformulation of learned helplessness, the interaction of two factors influences whether helplessness experienced in one situation will transfer to a new situation. The model predicts that people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to global factors will show helplessness deficits in new situations that are either similar or dissimilar to the original situation in which they were helpless…
Self-blame and depressive symptoms
Are internal attributions for bad events always associated with depression? The depressive symptoms of 87 female undergraduates correlated with blame directed at their own characters. In contrast, blame directed at their own behaviors correlated with lack of depressive symptoms. Behaviorally attributed bad events were seen as more controllable and their causes less stable and less global than were characterologically attributed bad events and the…
Attributional styles and life events in the classroom: Vulnerability and invulnerability to depressive mood reactions
A core prediction of the reformulated model of learned helplessness and depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) is that when confronted with the same negative life event, people who display a generalized tendency to attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable, or global factors should be more likely to experience a depressive mood reaction than people who typically attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable, or specific facto…
Machiavellianism and spontaneous cheating in competition
The Influence of Prayer Coping on Mental Health among Cardiac Surgery Patients: The Role of Optimism and Acute Distress
To address the inconsistent findings and based on Hegel's dialectic contradictive principle, this study tested a parallel mediation model that may underlie the association of using prayer for coping with cardiac surgery outcomes. Three sequential interviews were conducted with 310 patients who underwent open-heart surgery. A structural equation model demonstrated that optimism mediated the favorable effect of prayer coping. Prayer coping was also…
Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality
In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all se…
The Posthumanism to Come
This essay aims to identify several related themes that regularly appear in posthumanist scholarship but which have not been theorized sufficiently, including the rhetoric of temporal and historical rupture, the logic of dialectical reversal, the effacement of human/animal difference, and above all the critical ascendancy of the term “posthumanism” itself. If one of the aims of posthumanism is to render the face of the human unknowable to itself,…
"Memory and the "Dispositional Shift
Generality and topic specificity of cognitive styles
Learning impairment following insoluble problems
Attribution in the Sports Pages: An Archival Investigation of the Covariation Hypothesis
"Memory and the "Dispositional Shift
Centrality of cognitive attributes
Machiavellianism and spontaneous cheating in competition
Recognition of noncontingency
Cognitive style and literary regression A study of student writers 1
Forty undergraduates, from either beginning or advanced writing classes, and classified as either abstract or concrete thinkers from responses to the “This I Believe” test, provided two works of prose fiction, which were coded for the use of regression techniques. As predicted, abstract thinkers with advanced training were most likely to employ regression. The relations among abstract cognitive style, creative writing training, and literary regre…
Self-blame and depressive symptoms
Are internal attributions for bad events always associated with depression? The depressive symptoms of 87 female undergraduates correlated with blame directed at their own characters. In contrast, blame directed at their own behaviors correlated with lack of depressive symptoms. Behaviorally attributed bad events were seen as more controllable and their causes less stable and less global than were characterologically attributed bad events and the…
The attributional Style Questionnaire
Patient behavior in hospitals: Helplessness, reactance, or both
Attributional styles and life events in the classroom: Vulnerability and invulnerability to depressive mood reactions
A core prediction of the reformulated model of learned helplessness and depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) is that when confronted with the same negative life event, people who display a generalized tendency to attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable, or global factors should be more likely to experience a depressive mood reaction than people who typically attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable, or specific facto…
Learned Helplessness and Victimization
The learned helplessness phenomenon is proposed as a model for the emotional numbing and maladaptive passivity sometimes following victimization. Victims may learn during the victimization episode that responding is futile. This learning is represented as an expectation of future response‐outcome independence (helplessness). Causal interpretations of the episode affect the chronicity and generality of deficits resulting from this expectation, as …
Causal explanations as a risk factor for depression: Theory and evidence.
Helplessness and hospitalization: More remarks
Our recent research (Raps, Peterson, Jonas, & Seligman, 1982), in which we concluded that hospitalization may cause learned helplessness among patients, was criticized because (a) perceived control was not directly assessed and (b) factors other than helplessness might explain the observed data. On a general level, we agree with these criticisms because our investigation was not fine grained. However, we suggest that field research in the helples…
Attributional style and the generality of learned helplessness
According to the logic of the attribution reformulation of learned helplessness, the interaction of two factors influences whether helplessness experienced in one situation will transfer to a new situation. The model predicts that people who exhibit a style of attributing negative outcomes to global factors will show helplessness deficits in new situations that are either similar or dissimilar to the original situation in which they were helpless…
Explanatory Style and Illness
Explanatory style is an individual difference that influences people's response to bad events The present article discusses the possibility that a pessimistic explanatory style makes illness more likely Several studies suggest that people who offer internal, stable, and global explanations for bad events are at increased risk for morbidity and mortality We tentatively conclude that passivity, pessimism, and low morale foreshadow disease and death…
Self-Serving Attributions for Individual and Group Performance
This study compares the self-serving attributions made by individuals acting alone with those acting in groups. Attributions for group performance to causal factors other than self and environment are also explored. 549 statements by professional athletes were coded for their attributional content. Lone performers made more self-serving attributions than team performers. Also, as player actions became more interdependent, players made fewer self-…
Explanatory style and academic performance among university freshman
Pessimistic explanatory style in the historical record: CAVing LBJ, presidential candidates, and East versus West Berlin
quot; The habitual way people explain causes (explanatory style) as assessed by questionnaire has been used to predict depression, achievement, and health, with a pessimistic style predicting poor outcomes. Because some individuals whose behavior is of interest cannot take questionnaires, their explanatory style can be assessed by blind, reliable content analysis of verbatim explanations (CAVE) from the historical record. We discuss three example…
Pessimistic explanatory style in the historical record: CAVing LBJ, presidential candidates, and East versus West Berlin
Pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for physical illness: A thirty-five-year longitudinal study
Explanatory style, the habitual ways in which individuals explain bad events, was extracted from open-ended questionnaires filled out by 99 graduates of the Harvard University classes of 1942-1944 at age 25. Physical health from ages 30 to 60 as measured by physician examination was related to earlier explanatory style. Pessimistic explanatory style (the belief that bad events are caused by stable, global, and internal factors) predicted poor hea…
Personal control and health promotion
Social Support: Seek and Ye Shall Find
Studies of social support typically have relegated the recipient of support to a passive role. Little empirical work has looked at an individual's active attempts to garner support from others. Two studies are reported that investigate individual differences in active support seeking. In study one (n = 66), the criterion validity of a new scale - dubbed SEEK - was demonstrated. Subjects who reported that they seek support from others in times of …
On Shortening the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire
Whitley (in press) described a short form of the Expanded Attributional Style Questionnaire (EASQ). The EASQ was created to remedy the unsatisfactory psychometric properties of the Attributional Style Questionnaire; therefore, the benefits of a short form must be balanced with the possible costs, lower reliability and, hence, lower validity. Data from eight different samples using the EASQ (N = 963) suggest that the best items on the EASQ differ …
Psychology (68 works) · Social Psychology (42 works) · Social Psychology (28 works) · Medicine (22 works) · Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction (21 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Clinical Psychology (17 works) · Optimism, Hope, and Well-being (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Psychotherapist (15 works)